The Scientist as Hero, indeed

A few years ago, a friend of mine had been raving at me about Kim Stanley Robinson, so I picked up his Mars Trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars). Briefly, it chronicles a truly fascinating method of colonizing Mars, and all of the trials and tribulations involved over the course of some two centuries. I tried reading the trilogy then, and found it interesting, but interminably slow at parts. I got the general idea (though I never did finish Blue Mars), but I just put the books aside until another time.

A few months ago, I picked up Red Mars and tried rereading it in earnest. I read the books in small blocks of time chipped out of my anatomy studying, and found that the books were really quite enjoyable. KSR takes quite a bit of poetic license in some arenas - for one, predicting technological advances and a speed of innovation that are ridiculously accelerated. But his ideas are always fascinating, his humor is oddball but amusing, and his landscapes are impressive.

What makes his books more than just another random SF trilogy, though, are his characters. Robinson has a knack for creating eminently likable people of a wide variety of temperaments. Part of it is that he stereotypes characters, but then draws out what makes them so stereotyped, and uses this to make a point. He has the Mind Doctor, Michel, who needs more doctoring than anyone else, the Engineer, Nadia, who has a compulsion to build lasting things, the Politician, the Revolutionary, etc, etc. All of the characters are beautifully constructed, and a joy to read about.

The best character by far, though, is the Scientist, Sax Russel. In the beginning of Green Mars KSR had one beautiful passage that left me speechless at his aptness in describing how scientists like to look at the world:

About a year later Nirgal and the other children began to figure out how to deal with the days when they were taught by Sax. He would start at the blackboard, sounding like a characterless AI, and behind his back they would roll their eyes and make faces as he droned on about partial pressures or infrared rays. Then one of them would see an opening and begin the game. He was helpless before it. He would say something like, "In nonshivering thermogenesis the body produces head using futile cycles," and one of them would raise a hand and say, "But why, Sax?" and everyone would stare hard at their lectern and not look at each other, while Sax would frown as if this had never happened before, and say, "Well, it creates heat without using as much energy as shivering does. The muscle proteins contract, but instead of grabbing they just slide over each other, and that creates heat."

Jackie, so sincerely the whole class nearly lost it: "But how?"

He was blinking now, so fast they almost exploded watching him. "Well, the amino acids in the proteins have broken covalent bonds, and the bonds release what is called bond dissociation energy."

"But why?"

Blinking ever harder: "Well, that's just a matter of physics." He diagrammed vigorously on the blackboard: "Covalent bonds are formed when two atomic orbitals merge to form a single bond orbital, occupied by electrons from both atoms. Breaking the bond releases thirty to a hundred kcals of energy."

Several of them asked, in chorus, "But why?"

This got him into subatomic physics, where the chain of whys and becauses could go on for a half hour without him ever once saying something they could understand. Finally they would sense they were near the end game. "But why?"

"Well," going cross-eyed as he tried to backtrack, "atoms want to get to their stable number of electrons, and they'll share electrons when they have to."

"But why?"

Now he was looking trapped. "That's just the way atoms bond. One of the ways."

"But WHY?"

A shrug. "That's how the atomic force works. That's how things came out-"

And they would all shout, "in the Big Bang."

They would howl with glee, and Sax's forehead would knot up as he realized that they had done it to him again. He would sigh, and go back to where he had been when the game began. But every time they started it again, he never seemed to remember, as long as the initial why was plausible enough. And even when he did recognize what was happening, he seemed helpless to stop it. His only defense was to say with a little frown, "Why what?" That slowed the game for a while; but then Nirgal and Jackie got clever in guessing what in any statement most deserved a why, and as long as they could do that, Sax seemed to feel it was his job to continue answering, right on up the chains of because to the Big Bang, or, every once in a while, to a muttered "We don't know."

"We don't know!" the class would exclaim in mock dismay. "Why not?"

"It's not explained," he said, frowning. "Not yet."

Later in the book, Sax discusses with a few characters about why he cannot abide by his 'Great Unexplainable', and works always to reduce the boundaries of it. Robinson shows a deep understanding of what drives true scientists - the wish to know, to understand, to explain.

I am an engineer, so my desire for understanding is tempered by a desire to use knowledge usefully, but I can understand Sax's frustration at not being able to answer, "Why?" I don't think we will ever know all of those why's from science... even the answer, "That's how it came out in the Big Bang," isn't really an answer, but rather just a more ultimate Why. Nevertheless, there is a certain joy and satisfaction in being able to quantify the universe, and to point at something that occurs, and say, "Aha! This is happening because of X."

I view this as a means to an end, a way to then change things given our understanding of how they work. The Scientist, though, pursues the answer as a means to its own end, on the premise that more knowledge is a good end to itself.

I wonder if teaching this fundamental value of natural knowledge to the non-scientists of the world would be a good thing. I think it would be. Thoughts?

Iran and Syria... rational actors?

Now this is a surprise... two posts in as many days?!

As most of my well-informed (and stunningly attractive and intelligent) readers may know, tensions along the Israeli-Lebanese border have been heating up. Several weeks ago, there were barrages of rocket attacks on Israeli towns in the northern Galil, and several infiltration/kidnapping attempts on IDF positions. Just today, Kiryat Shmoneh was hit by Katyusha fire. Needless to say, Israelis are not happy - they pulled out of Lebanon over five years ago precisely to end this sort of violence.

The Jerusalem Post had an interesting editorial that matches much of what has been recommended by a number of Israeli sources in the last few months. To summarize: The old model of Israeli retaliation on terrorist sites after an attack needs to be replaced by direct raids and retaliation on the governments that support such terrorist organizations - in this case, most notably Syria (though other editorials do not feel that Iran and the PA should be free of said attacks).

This is not news - there have been statements coming out of IDF High Command for quite some time that seem to agree on most points. If Hezbollah continues to attack targets in northern Israel, Israel will begin to attack targets in Syria (likely military installations and terrorist training grounds, using IAF strikes).

The logic, the article claims, is thus: Syria is reacting to intense international pressure by attacking Israel through its proxy. As the rest of the world refuses to do anything other than talk, Syria must be taught forcefully that it will directly pay for using such tactics.

I feel that this article may have a point, but its logic is flawed. In another JPost editorial (I can't seem to find it anymore; roughly 2-3 weeks before this post), the author was claiming that while no one would like to see a nuclear Iran, Israel could survive with one, given their enormous deterrence capability. The article suggested improving Israel's nuclear and retaliatory powers even further so that Iran would be foolish to start a nuclear war.

Both of these articles assumed something quite dangerous. They assume that Iran and Syria are rational players in international politics. (I don't mean rational in the colloquial sense, but rather in the political science context.) Can Syria truly 'learn' that its behavior in reacting to international pressure will have dire consequences from Israeli retaliations - and will this translate into better policies? Syria knows that Israel is a leashed guard dog - it may bark, it may even bite anyone who gets close enough, but it is being held back from truly ruinous retaliation by the US (and, to a lesser extent, by other nations). Even if it is scared by the Israeli threats (and eventually, actions), will Syria make the connection between this and its actions?

I think not. Similarly, I could argue that deterrence in Iran only works assuming that Iran is rational.

IDF High Commands knows this more than I do. Why are they developing this new policy toward Syria? I think that the true target of this policy is not Syria, but rather the rest of the world. The rest of the world realizes that Israel is just waiting for a chance to really mess with Syria. They fought a proxy war with Syria for 20 years to no real end, and never really got to damage them much in either of the major wars they fought directly with the country. If the international community can be spooked by Israel's more provocative actions, they may bring even greater pressure to bear on Syria to shape up.

The danger of this, of course, is that if Israel is too aggressive, the attention will shift from Syrian intransigence to Israel, and the opportunity will have been lost. For now, the world sympathizes with Israel on its northern border... but for how long? I wonder.

What is much more worrisome than Syria, though, is Iran. Israel cannot have a logical reason for believing that deterrence will work. And they have only made vague noises about attacking Iran. In reality, most 'experts' seem to think that it would be extremely difficult to carry off. Iran's nuclear facilities are dispersed and well-protected, and are at the very edge of the IAF's striking distance. More difficult would be the presence of a huge American force directly between Israel and Iran, meaning that Israel would either have to skirt around Iraq, or suffer the consequences (either political or military) of infringing on US-controlled airspace.

Thus, Israel seems to have no real options in dealing with Iran... and the world's diplomatic efforts seem to have failed in the light of new Iranian president.

Israel must hope that Iran is rational. That is not the most reassuring of thoughts.

Any suggestions?

Can individual beliefs be abstracted to a communal level?

I was in a bookstore this evening, and as usual I quickly browsed through the 'current affairs' section before continuing my shopping. There wasn't really anything new there, but something about the collection of books - the zeitgeist of the times, if I can steal a term - something struck me. I suddenly was convinced down to my bones that there was something fundamentally wrong with the world. I had a moment where I felt like a complete stranger, looking at the world as if anew, and thought to myself, 'Wow. This place is messed up in a really sad way.'

Okay, okay, 99% of my readers are not surprised by this (or, rather, since I doubt I have 100 readers, one might say that one reader is completely unsurprised, and the other is only 2% surprised). Nor am I, really - I've known this for years, but was overwhelmed by the ringing truth of this thought in my head.

Why, do you ask? Well, permit me an excursion into the past, and I will presently explain it. Oh, and apologies if I write a bit oddly today; I've been reading too much Paarfi lately.

Since a fairly young age, I've kept abreast of news, at least on the barest levels. My parents always encouraged us to read the newspapers, and I took an active interest in increasing numbers of world news topics as I grew older. It always seemed a good idea to have a firm grasp of current events, but by the time I was 14 or 15, I began to be intrigued not by the news itself, but by the underlying subtext.

I began to first ask the hows of the world - how are decisions made and carried out, how do events occur as they do, etc... and these answers inevitably led me to ask the more ultimate whys. For the last 5 or 6 years, then, I've developed a hobby of trying to understand why the world works the way it does. I've spent quite a bit of time reading histories, political science texts, essays, news analyses, economics, dabbling in sociological theory, etc, in an attempt to answers these questions. Obviously, I have only attained a cursory understanding of each topic (scholars in any of these fields could undoubtedly leave me in the dust), but I've aimed for a global understanding of the driving forces of world events.

There are plenty of ideologies out there to explain things, from popular to scholarly, and from emotionally based to the most rigorous of logics. I feel that most of these fail in that they base their understandings on a few basic theses of human interaction and behavior, whereas true motivations are much more complex. Some of the more interesting bits I've seen have tried to model events and interactions by chaos theory or by evolutionary pressures, but even that fails as it tries to quantify too many variables that are unquantifiable (is that a word? now it is).

Whatever the root causes, though, this leads to the world as it is today. And the topics covered in this section of the bookstore were revealing. There was a large emphasis on empire building, clashes of culture, humanitarian failures, failures in systems of government, increasingly limited resources (in a presumably closed system), struggles for cultural and political supremacy, and the personalities driving all of these events. You can fill in the blanks for specifics regarding your country's current events (or global politics), but that's a function of the specific snapshot in time, not of the underlying state of the world.

What is bothersome about this all is that most individuals would not say that our world should be in that form. Oh, for a specific decision or state, they may side one way or another, but fundamentally people do not work on the same principles that the world does. This curious contrast between the motivations of individuals and the events of the world is probably why there exist the aforementioned scholarly (and not-so-scholarly) disciplines.

How does the sums of billions (well, trillions) of human interactions, actions, and reactions create the world as we see it today? Ignoring any partisan influence, I think that everyone would agree that starvation is a bad thing. Or that the deaths of millions annually in human-organized slaughters (ie, war) is similarly unwanted. Or that people should be given as much choice in their destinies as possible, so long as they do not impinge on the choices of others (yes, the interpretations of this can be quite varying, but the fundamental idea is one that most people could agree on, no?). No one can seriously say they do not care about equity of one sort or another, from resources to 'rights' to 'choice' or any other concept that they find overridingly important. So then, why does the world have such obvious discrepancies?

I will bring up some specific points from current events just to drive the point home. In the Arab-Israeli conflict, it seems that stripped of all of the ideologies, there should be no fundamental disagreement between the two sides. Oh, yes, there are people who would like to wipe Israel off the map - along with a few Israelis who wouldn't mind wiping most of the Arabs out. But when you get down to their actual values - completely bypassing concepts of 'nationality' and 'religion' and such that drive them - they would probably have very little reason to fight, as it would be much more productive to work in tandem.

In the United States, we've recently been outraged by (or firmly supportive of) our government's invasion of our privacy and reductions in personal liberties. For some reason, we have come to a situation where many feel that our two desires for personal security and personal liberty are at odds. With such seemingly disparate concepts, how has this occurred? Theoretically, everyone would love to have the maximum of both.

I could go on, but you get the point. Individual choices and ideals, when abstracted to communal or global ones, fail to be realized. Now, some people would argue that this is merely because we have imperfect systems - and that is true, we do have extremely flawed systems. But I wonder if somehow, in this leap from the one to the many, the sum of our interactions somehow makes a utopia impossible. Something causes a fundamental clash of our individually held beliefs (the barest of which are nearly universal) when they come to the fore.

And this causes a world that most of us shudder to contemplate. So, then - should we even bother measuring the state of the world by our individual beliefs, or by some other rubric?

Hmm.

I know this isn't really that clear or organized, I was just rambling in a stream-of-consciousness after my odd feeling at the bookstore. But it is quite fascinating to consider how this all works.

I normally don't preach, but...

Well, here's a really fascinating blog by a friend of my family's. He's a brilliant guy with pretty good ideas/thoughts on many technological issues. In fact, he's just written a book about how revolutions in technology come about, and the best way to structure businesses to encourage them.

Anyhow, his blog is here:

http://www.pebbleandavalanche.com/weblog

Give it a look if you have a few minutes, eh?

Not-so-invisible barriers

First, a caveat: I am not an expert on Baltimore. Don't take what I say as the gospel truth; come here and find out for yourself. Hell, I'll even make you dinner or something if one of my loyal readers visits. This is just my (admittedly limited) observations.

I moved into Pikesville, a suburb on the northwest corner of the city (I'm half a block away from the Bmore city neighborhood of Mount Washington). In the five or six weeks before I finally got a car, I was taking public transit to Hopkins every day. Aside from my rather low opinion of the system itself (precipitating my decision to buy a car), I was somewhat disappointed by some of the things I noticed about the city, particularly with regards to race relations.

Baltimore is roughly two thirds black and one third white (virtually no other ethnicities exist in the city). I imagine the suburbs are a bit more skewed in the direction of whites (or other ethnicities), but that's pretty much the makeup of the city itself. The area from which I picked up a bus and then the Metro (subway) is one of the few predominantly white neighborhoods in the city. Yet oddly, the proportion of white people taking public transit, even from my area, was vanishingly small, confined to students and the occasional downtown professional who didn't care to drive to work (don't get me started on the traffic flow management here...).

This bothered me for a while, and I think I've finally put my finger on why. As far as I can tell, Baltimore has rigid racial boundaries. Any number of children I've spoken to have unconsciously voiced a feeling that the other race was somehow 'other' (both white and black kids, though my sample of white kids was larger). There are extremely few neighborhoods that have any significant amount of racial mixing; even if people live in the same area, they simply don't associate with other races.

And what bothered me about public transit was this: Baltimore's public transit is shitty. It's slow, rarely on schedule, and it can't even get you anywhere (one subway line with 20 or so stops, a light rail akin to Metra from Chicago, and a small and poorly organized bus system). Before I bought a car, I felt trapped I could not use my time effectively to shop, commute, study, etc. It was simply impossible to get to any number of places in and around the city in any decent amount of time (and sometimes not at all).

Now, the alternative to taking public transit is to own a car - but that is an extremely expensive proposition, no? Car insurance rates in Baltimore city are extremely high due to the car theft rate. So that leaves those without the means of buying a car in a bit of a fix.

The black people riding the Metro were not poor, or criminals, or anything else I've heard as stereotypes in the last two months. They were just people trying to get to work or school, like everyone else... but they simply didn't have the means for their own transportation. To me, this highlighted and extremely disturbing financial divide that correllates with racial lines. These people were not from the inner city, yet they still were clearly not as well off as their white counterparts in similar jobs and situations. The abominable state of the Baltimore public transit system exacerbates this problem, splitting the city into 'haves' and 'have nots' in a very recognizable manner.

(I should mention that while I'm sure this happens in every city, it's nowhere near as obvious. In Chicago, vast hordes of people of every stripe take public transit every day, because it gets them to work/school/whatever with a minimum of fuss. It's just that in Baltimore, the cost/benefit analysis is so skewed in favor of cars that the makeup of the population riding the train can be so instructive.)

I found this obervation coupled with other tidbits I picked up here and there to be... disappointing. Why do we have such obvious and rigid racial/economic boundaries? I grew up being taught the credo that people were just people regardless, and should be treated accordingly. On any random street in my neighborhood you could find a dozen nationalities, ethnicities, religions, etc. Why do some places have these sharp divisions? I thought such silliness was a thing of the past.

Now, I can understand the existence of urban ghettos, no matter how I abhor them. But these were normal, middle class, working people. Why do they also need to reap the harvest of our countries' past mistakes?

I think that these glaringly obvious demarcations between the races is the thing that I most dislike about Baltimore. I am sad that situations like this still exist.

Yes, yes, yes. I know. This is rather late in coming.

Let's skip all of the 'where the hell were you for five months's, shall we? It's been a very interesting time. I moved to Baltimore in late August for grad school, and things have been amazingly hectic. First, I was homeless for a week due to school starting before my lease did. Then, I was suffering from internet withdrawal at home because getting broadband takes time. *sighs* And somewhere in there I realized that graduate school is actually supposed to be difficult, and it started taking over my life. Add that to buying an ugly car and racking up amazing amounts of minutes on the phone with the lady, and well... I'm sure you get the idea.

So, there are quite a number of things I'd just love to write about, but I think I'll start with some impressions of Baltimore, in the next post. Stay tuned! I can't say I'll be updating daily, but it might be semi-regular again, for all of you (*cough*) readers.

There ain't no such thing as a free lunch...

...but there are such things as free slurpees.

A good friend of mine used to joke that 7 Eleven gave out free slurpees on his birthday. Of course, it wasn't quite because it was his birthday, but rather for the more prosaic reason for it being the eleventh of July (more proof that 7 Eleven must be an American company; else they'd hand out slurpees on the seventh of November). But nonetheless, an amusing idea.

Today is twenty years since his birth. Have a slurpee in his honor, eh?

Jingle-jangle

After a longish absence, I bring you an odd thought:

It's always a fun exercise to try and see what themes historians of the future will draw out of our times as being unique or representative of change. Undoubtedly, rapidly proceeding industrialization, revolutions in communication and electronic media will be some of the obvious ones. Others that people speculate about are the death of nationalism (heh, they're a bit premature on that one, but meh), the 'space age', dramatically improved healthcare, etc.

But what about a random little sidebar in a history text? What are those little examples of how life changed for us compared to those before us? I posit that one possibility might be remarkably simple: keys.

Look in your pocket - how many keys do you have? On a rough count, I've got eight or nine - four for my home, another couple for my parent's place, a bike lock, a key or two for work, a mail key, etc. And I'm remarkably lightweight on keys - I don't have any vehicles, nothing complicated at work, no P.O. boxes, nothing. Most adults have dozens of keys, all for various obscure purposes. (A caveat - for now, I'll just talk about developed nations in urban areas... that's a remarkably large portion of the population that is likely to be focused on in histories for this era, so I think I'm safe in working on with those.)

Now, how many keys did that average person have one hundred years ago? Not as many, but still a decent number, right? What about two hundred years ago? Okay, that's a lot fewer. And add another hundred years, and probably next to no one had keys except for jailers.

I don't know the exact reason for this - probably something to do with the rise of cities and the greater ease of fencing goods for quick profits. I would suggest, though, that it hints at an underlying societal concern with personal security that increased in the last few centuries. Think about it - you all have dozens of passwords, encryption schemes, keys, firewalls, deadbolts, etc. There are whole industries focusing on providing better security - with either something that you know (e.g. passwords), something you have (e.g. keys) or something you are (e.g. biometrics) (thanks to a friends' father for those distinctions). Are we so much more worried with security because our goods and property are so much more valuable now? Or do we have a preoccupation with imagined terrors for some obscure psychological reason? I don't know; I'm just pointing out an interesting phenomenon.

But think of all of the subtle ways in which society is shaped by keys. The bare minimum of things that people always take with them include keys (and, my guess would be, wallet and cell phone). You hear the jingle-jangle of keys everywhere - it's ubiquitous. People can even tell who's approaching by the sound of their keys or of the way they look through their keyring to find the correct one. Giving keys to one's home to another person is taken as a sign of trust. The examples go on - make up as many as you want. It's an intriguing thought, no? I wonder what it says about us.

In reality, of course, I doubt anyone would think this was important enough to stress, except perhaps in some poor history grad student's thesis. But fun to speculate nonetheless.

Can one person really do it?

In an introductory engineering class I took several years ago, a lecturer made the assertion that no single person could make something as simple as a pencil, any more. All of the specialized steps - from logging to processing graphite to finishing, etc. - are far too complex to be mastered by a single person. He was making a point about the interdependence of everyone in our current industrial world, and the important of stakeholders at each step of the way.

For some inane reason I recalled this assertion a few days ago, and realized that the lecturer had overlooked (or omitted) the hardest part of a pencil to make by oneself: the eraser.

Now, I know you are all thinking, "What on earth is he talking about? Erasers are incredibly simple! Is this going to be another annoying and trite post?" Have no fear, my intrepid readers! I actually have a small point.

Think about it: what goes into the design of a good pencil eraser? Well, erasers seem to work on two principles: smudging and graphite removal. The action of the eraser smudges the pencil marks (much like you could do with a finger, albeit much more efficiently), but also the little bits of eraser that come off 'pick up' the pieces of graphite and can be blown off (note how they turn black with graphite).

This makes extremely demanding requirements for a good pencil eraser. First, it has to attach well to itself and graphite. Second, the mechanical properties (particularly, but not exclusively, the Young's modulus) need to be optimized to allow the flexibility and "give" so that the eraser doesn't rip the paper - yet the eraser also must hold together strongly enough to not develop defects from erasing. Next, pieces of the eraser material need to be able to flake off as they are rubbed on paper. Add on requirements of being nontoxic, easily disposed of, inexpensive, reliable over a range of pencil and paper types, longevity concerns, etc... it becomes a very sticky problem relating to materials science, mechanical engineering, industrial and manufacturing engineering, and more.

Theoretically, one could just fool around and find something that works (which is how I suspect erasers were first developed), but to truly optimize the design, this requires extremely careful thought and a team of specialists.

So, to sum up, erasers are quite impressive and cool. Next time you need to fix a math problem (or a crossword puzzle, for those of you poor souls no longer taking math), appreciate the sheer genius of the simple things around you.

Obscure joke of the week

Courtesy of HaRav HaGaon HaNichbad Dune Shlita, I bring you a joke that half of you won't get and the other half will think is hilarious:

What do you get when you cross a Yekka and a Lubavitcher?





Someone who is always exactly twenty minutes late.

(Now's your cue to laugh.)

That's replaced my old favorite, the muffin joke. (Two muffins are sitting in an oven. One muffin says, "Boy, it's hot in here!" The other muffin says, "Look! A talking muffin!"

*Bows*