Once more to the Emergency room

View 810 Friday, February 14, 2014

Happy Feast of Lupercalia and Spring Fertility Rites

 

If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightfully consider it an act of war.

Glenn T. Seaborg, National Commission on Education, 1983

 

Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.

Syrian Freedom Fighters

 

2300: We’re back home, after yet another trip to the Kaiser Emergency room. It could have been a lot worse.

I took Roberta to an Italian restaurant on Ventura not far from where the first LASFS clubhouse was many years ago. They have gluten free pizza, and it’s better than the other place we used to go. Good dinner. We came home. I was carrying, alas in both hands, the two boxes of leftover pizza with another box containing antipasto salad which they also do gluten free, and is excellent. As I got into the back yard I saw on the ground the remains of the box of valentine candy I had got for Roberta. I leaned down to pick it up. With both hands carrying something. At dusk. The result was easily predicted, and in fact happened as expected. I went onto my face on the concrete pool deck.

Nothing broken. Lots of blood. At first I thought it was my nose bleeding, but it wasn’t, it was from various cuts and lacerations on my face. A couple were pretty big. Still lots of blood. And my glasses were a wreck.

Got inside, cleaned my face up, and Roberta insisted we go to the emergency room, which we did. As usual the Kaiser team was efficient and cheerful, and after a couple of stitches and a precautionary prescription, we came home. I feel like an idiot.

I know I don’t have any balance at dusk, I know that when I encumber both arms so I can’t counterbalance I am likely to fall down, and I damned well should have known there was no point in picking up the empty candy box. I already knew when I was bending over that Roberta must have left the box in the TV room where I gave it to her just before we went out for dinner, and that Sable must have found it and took it outside to devour the contents. Husky dogs are more cooperative than obedient, and if she can find something she figures it must have been left for her anyway. And since she is supposed to be dying of terminal cancer we don’t have the heart to severely discipline her as we might were she not supposed to have died six months ago. Huskies always test their status in the pack, and even when sick they’ll see what they can get away with.  But then that’s the way with good dogs and growing human being as well. I recall from one of the sermons of Cotton Mather “Tether a beast at midnight, and by dawn it will know the length of its tether.”  Anyone who has raised children or dogs will know the truth of that…

Anyway, the next time you see me I will have another set of Heidelberg dueling scars to go with the ones I got from falling out of bed. My forehead, my nose, and a cheek. Lots of blood. Nothing serious done.

And once again I can recommend Kaiser Permanente for health maintenance. It has been about 40 years now that we’ve been with Kaiser, and they have seen us through the usual problems with children as our four boys grew up, and after the boys were gone, the two of us. We have many stories, and all positive.  And when the time came that I was forced to stop paying my own way and go on Medicare (my membership cost went from about $350 a month to $1300 the day I turned 65, because Federal law essentially required that), my relationship with Kaiser did not change in any way.  I have seldom met anyone out there who wasn’t pleasant.

And I expect this is enough explanation for why there isn’t an essay on the Kurds in Syria and the dilemma they present. Think about it. Kurdish Iraq is the only pacified territory in what used to be called Iraq; it looks in fact a lot like the democracy we tried to plant in the country as a whole, and possibly shows what might have happened had we divided Iraq into Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish republics: possibly all three might have survived. Possibly. The two Kurdish factions seem to have settled their differences without war.

But of course a Kurdistan built on the remains of what used to be a Kurdish area ruled by Arabs is more than annoying to Iran, where there are probably as many Kurds as in Iraq, and Turkey, which is been going more and more Islamic and has already had a campaign of suppression of the Kurds in Turkey, of which there are quite a few.

The Christian Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem was ended when Saladin defeated the Christian forces at the Horns of Hattin, starting the Third Crusade which generated many stories and novels. Sir Walter Scott’s The Talisman comes to mind, and if you haven’t read it you might very well like it. It is about a knight in Richard Lionheart’s forces during the Third Crusade, and features Saladin as a major character in it.

Saladin was a Kurd; and with his Kurdish forces as the centerpiece of his army he was able to unite most of the Islamic world and revive the Caliphate.

Kurds are not Arabs. Neither are Persians, but Kurds are not Persians, either. Kurds and Persians are Aryans (the name Iran comes form Aryana, the land of the Aryans) but Turks are not. And if all this seems like outdated humbug, it is still taken seriously in the Middle East, where clans and origins are important. “My brother and I against my cousin; my cousin and I against the world.”

And I’m exhausted and it’s bed time. More later. At least I have a good reason for not writing more tonight.

The Pledge Drive ends soon. My financial harangues coincide with the KUSC pledge drives, KUSC being the Classical Music Station of Los Angeles. They are Public Radio. This site operates on the Public Radio model: it’s fee, anyone can access it, but it will only stay open if enough subscribe to make it worth doing. If you read here and have not subscribed, this would be a good time to do it. If you have subscribed but have not renewed the subscription in a while, this would be a good time to do it.

I don’t bug you about money very often. I don’t bash you with advertising. But I do remind you that you should consider subscribing, and time that for when KUSC runs their pledge drives. http://www.jerrypournelle.com/paying.html

 

You and Mr. Strohm posit that science has gone astray, that current theories such as General Relativity, Quantum Field Theory, and cosmological theory are wrong because, as said in so many words, they are too complicated and not intuitively addressable. You quote from Mr. Feynman his skepticism about his own "all histories" model of Quantum Field Theory to support your position. You declaim dark matter and dark energy as non-sense because they cannot be detected by current means, and in the past you have written poorly about General Relativity because it is formulated in tensors, which you hold as too complicated a tool for a valid theory.

Slow down! You do realize that our classical theories are just as replete with the undetectable and the undefined as well as the complex mathematics? Let’s take Newton’s Laws of Gravity. What is gravity? Ok, a force that draws bodies of mass together — but what the heck IS the force? We can detect what it does to bodies with mass, but we have no detection of the force itself. If I push on a body, I can see and detect my hand doing the pushing, but no one has ever seen gravity. I can describe what this force does between two bodies very elegantly with simple mathematics, but if I want accurate answers for just one additional body, I am reduced to using systems of equations iterated over time to find my answer — systems of equations much more readily defined and manipulated as tensors.

Classical science is full of things that have been given names, but have only ever been defined in terms of what they do, not what they are. We have gotten so used to this that most of us do not even wonder what they are any more or realize that we should wonder.

These things of science, classical and quantum, Newtonian and relativistic, are models of reality. Many of them never tell us what the thing is that they are modeling, they just give us a system of equations that accurately describes all past observed behavior and makes accurate predictions about as yet to be observed behavior. They are accepted and used because, empirically, they are useful.

So, General Relativity says that the things we observe can be modeled accurately if we assume that gravity curves space-time. Does General Relativity actually make the claim that space-time is curved? No, just that our observations and predictions are in accordance with the model of a curved space-time. Maybe space-time is curved; maybe it is not curved. More science is needed to settle that question.

Quantum Field Theory is in a similar position. It is a model that is in accordance with millions of observations and thousands of predictions, but, is the world really a unitary wave evolving over time? Do particles actually travel all possible paths? Is an electron whose momentum is know with high precision actually spread completely over the known universe in its position? Quantum Field Theory does not say yea or nay to any of these questions; it only says that our observations can be modeled accurately by these behaviors.

So slow down a bit when you fret over dark matter and dark energy. The word "dark" is there as much to acknowledge the fact that these things are fudge factors, added to our existing models to account for the outcome of numerous observations, but are of unknown nature. Science is trying to fill in this unknown with further observation and experimentation, but such activities always begin with speculation on what the dark stuff is, or we would not able to design experiments to identify it in the first place.

Kevin

A reasonable view. Dick Feynman said you had to put faith in something, and the more you studied the quantum effects the more you needed faith to believe you could understand it. I suppose I am a dinosaur in wanting to see a less complex universe. I am still not happy with the multiplication of particles and factors. And I am even less happy with the tendency to ignore evidence in favor of theory, as is happening in some practical matters.

 

Jerry:

There was a hidden truth in that report on the Kenyan "innovator."

The blame was laid on landing gear which was unable to handle the weight of the plane. They have identified a CORRECT cause of failure, but not the TRUE cause.

They have forgotten that the goal was to get the plane light enough to fly, and worry about how the landing gear isn’t strong enough while it’s on the ground.

This is a perfect example of the "Progressive" mindset. The fault was not that the load was too heavy, but instead that it didn’t get the support that it deserved.

Keith

 

My sentiments exactly while watching that.

 

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.