Michael Flynn's Blog, page 39

Who Needs It?

Spring Housecleaning Washington Post opinion columnists are making suggestions for what we can throw out.

What should we throw out?  Read here.

Kindle Release

Melodies of the Heart For those who have always ached to possess this novella in a stand-alone format, here is your big chance.  Melodies of the Heart for the Kindle at the bargain price of $2.99.  It's the story that made some of its readers cry, even the second or third time they read it. 

Melodies of the Heart is the lead story in Captive Dreams, a collection of short fiction due out in July of this year.  At the link you have the opportunity to email Melodies@PhoenixPick.com in order to get a reminder when the full collection comes out.  You may also purchase a pre-release copy of the collection at a good discount, I am told. 

Some of you may grumble, "But TOF, why should we pay our hard-earned gold for a bunch of your old stories, which we have read in the long-ago?"

The answer is simple. Read more »

The Copernicus Syndrome

For Some Values of "Unique" The lead for an article on extrasolar planets runs:

HD 10180—a sunlike star in the southern constellation Hydrus—may have as many as nine orbiting planets. 

And concludes with the following quote from the study leader:

"So [our] solar system is only one example among a spectrum of different planetary systems we will find in the near future and [is] definitely not unique."
-- study leader Mikko Tuomi, astronomer at the University of Hertfordshire

Let us ponder this. 
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Eugene

And on a related topic......to the previous post, a few years ago before his current blow-up, John Derbyshire wrote:

“If you don’t like eugenics, you are not going to like the 21st century. ... The desire to have smart, healthy, good-looking offspring is wellnigh universal. If parents can get assurance of such an outcome for a few thousand bucks, why should they not purchase that assurance? In a free country, how will you stop them? And why would conservatives or libertarians want to stop them? 'Eugenics' has become such a scare-word that we’ll probably have to re-name the process to avoid all the shrieking and skirt-clutching; but it will be eugenics just the same.”

 And you thought the utilitarian approach to human beings was restricted to liberals?  On certain matters, the elites really do think alike.  But there are two objections to this hope for an earthly eschaton in which we will put on new bodies of a glorified nature.  One is technical and one is fundamental. 
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Thinking Bioethically

Here

Speaking precisely

Let's Be PreciseIT PAYS TO BE CAREFUL.  In statistics, precision differs from accuracy; but sometimes folks might state a precision and give the impression that they've stated an accuracy.  "This poll has a margin of error of ±3%" is just one example.  I recall one polling season when a host of polls cited such a margin, but cited also estimated outcomes that differed by far more than that margin.  All but one of the seven or eight polls gave margins of ±3% around the wrong answer.*

(*The polls were each taken the day before the election by different organizations, and the election results were used as the standard reference.)

Remainder of the essay is here:


The images below the cut have been uploaded here because for some reason LJ will let me pull images from my computer while Blogger will not.  At least not today. 

Wiping the Scales from Our Eyes

Pointilism and Global WarmingUnless you are fractal, scale matters.  Percival Lowell thought he saw canals on Mars.  Partly, this was because he wanted to see canals on Mars; but partly too it was because at the scale his telescopes could resolve a bunch of otherwise unconnected dots seemed to form lines.  

Consider Seurat's Grande Jatte.  Since artists were beginning to consider themselves intellectuals, the paining was intended to show the banality of bourgeois life (in this case, the Sunday promenade).  

Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte
(Un dimanche après-midi à l’Ile de la Grande Jatte),
Georges Seurat, 1884-1886.Read more »

Brow-beating

A Di-LemmaA reader with the monometopian name of OneBrow wrote in comment to an earlier post: 

As traditionally presented, the argument from motion rarely lists all the assumptions at the beginning. Assumptions such as "motion must be externally activated from potential" and "motion can not be in an infinite chain" get worked into the argument, often by declaring them to be obvious (the very notion of being an assumption). By then end of the argument, there are a fairly good-sized number of assumptions (each distinct argument having its distinct subset).

Now, in mathematics, a lemma is a proven statement used as a step in the proof of a bigger theorem.  There is no formal difference between a lemma and a theorem -- both follow the same rules of proof -- but there is a material difference.  The main interest centers on the matter of the theorem, while the matter of the lemma is of little interest in itself at the moment.  In the same manner a carpenter may use a hammer in the construction of a cabinet without any imputation that the hammer is simply assumed, and not itself constructed.
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Crucifixion

Good FridayThe link is to a picture of the painting that hangs behind the altar of St. Bernard's Oratory, Easton PA, a part of Our Lady of Mercy Parish.  It is copyrighted by the artist Dana Van Horn and cannot be copied and displayed here, but you may click this link:

The Crucifixion, by Dana Van Horn

Some thoughts on scientism

Commentary on Jerry Oltion I had fallen way behind on my reading of ANALOG, so it is only lately that I have come across Jerry Oltion's essay, "What Science Means to Me"  [Jan/Feb 2012].  The Perceptive Reader will be unsurprised to learn that it means everything to him.  "My approach to life is scientific, and what understanding I have of life comes through analytic thought."  Evidently, synthetic thought is not to be used.  One imagines him waking to a clear blue sky and seeing stretched above him... the Rayleigh scattering of sunlight.  Well and good.  So do we all, whether we know it or not, and a knowledge of how the sky appears blue adds a lagniappe of pleasure.  (Saving only that there is something in the qualia of the sensation of blue that cannot be captured by light wave scattering or neurobiology.  More on this later.) 

For another 'tude, consider Werner Heisenberg.  While walking with Heisenberg one day, the physicist Felix Bloch, who had just read Weyl's Space, Time and Matter, felt moved to declare that space is simply the field of linear equations.  Heisenberg replied, "Nonsense. Space is blue and birds fly through it." "What he meant," Bloch later wrote, "was that it was dangerous for a physicist to describe Nature in terms of idealized abstractions too far removed from the evidence of actual observation."  Let us explore this dichotomy.  
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