Archives for May 2021

So there’s a story you might like. Years ago I went to Central Liquors. It’s in downtown DC. It’s the kind of place you remember going to when you were very drunk late on a Saturday night. I was into wine and the Wine Spectator had run ads that Central Liquors was selling Chateau DuCru for $59 a bottle, which seemed odd because everyone else was selling it for $89. Naturally, I had to go investigate. I’m nosing around the store when a guy in a gray sweatshirt and similarly styled sweatpants says, “Can I help you?” My first impression was he was an electrician’s apprentice. (too old to be that, but that was my impression.) I say, “Yeah.” And ask my question. When I finish he says, “I paid $59 a bottle for that lot. I’ve got some in the back that I’ll sell for $89 when that runs out.” Okay. I now know he’s the owner. Then he says, “But if you like that …” and he motions me to follow him to the back of the store. Next thing we are at a little table filled with wine bottles swirling glasses, sniffing and drinking. I’m leaving the store with two cases and have spent $250 (this is like 30 years ago.) I’m half in the bag. He’s got a table up front with wine on sale. I’ve got an open slot in one of the boxes. I ask if anything on here is any good. He says, “Yeah.” and pulls out this bottle – half price, 50 bucks. “Why half price?” I ask. “Didn’t sell,” he says. I buy it. Gaja Barolo. The Gaja family brought back the Barolo grape. It is the top of that wine. From Northern Italy. Now, I’ve got a problem. What am I going to do with one bottle of this kind of wine? Mi Ann, Scott Skinner, Dean Jordan, Jose, Ron, Blake – I ask you? Well, Corey comes to town. We have dinner. I serve the wine. He says, “This is pretty good. How much does it cost?” I say, “One hundred bucks.” He nearly choked. Yeah, it was worth every penny.

Sunday May 30, 2021

I am reading George Greensein’s book entitled “Quantum Strangeness.”

I am taking my time, reading one chapter a day.

The chapters aren’t long, and so far the topics aren’t hard to understand.

What I am enjoying more than his trying to explain quantum physics is his describing how he didn’t understand it as a student in college, and nor did it seem did his professors.

It seemed they were all playing an elaborate game, a kabuki play of “The King has no Clothes.” Either it was “We’ll all pretend to understand,” or “We don’t talk about that (because we don’t understand, so please don’t ask).”

How refreshing!

Greenstein got by by learning how to answer the questions posed. But understanding eluded him.

There were the famous thought experiments posed by Einstein and answered by Bohr. 

Einstein was not convinced. Not sure about Bohr.

Einstein thought that quantum theory was only half a theory, because if it was complete some basic questions could and should be answerable.

Bohr said Einstein was asking the wrong question.

I’ve always had problems with the Theory of Relativity. What happens when the training traveling at the speed of light switches on its headlamp? 

Does the light not leave the lamp?

Does it matter where you are observing it from? (On the train or as a bystander on the hill beside the track?

I got a glimmer today when I read about spin.

Maybe, I’m asking the wrong question. Or maybe the question is irrelevant because the situation can not exist? If a train went the speed of light wouldn’t it become light and hence there is no train? Not at that speed at least.

So in the topic on spin Greenstein said that in the quantum world you can not think of spin as related to a horizontal and vertical axis but rather as a matrix of possibilities: of which there are two.

I dropped out of math classes at matrix algebra. I got it, but so what? 

Then came Cohl Furey and her lectures on Octagonal Algebra. Here’s a woman who was thinking about an abandoned part of mathematics. It was abandoned in the 80s when vectors came into popularity with big ass computing. Vectors can be used in weather mapping and boat design to tell the direction of a storm or the shape of a hull. However, what Furey pointed out in her lectures was that vectors don’t have enough descriptors to account for spin. In her wonderful recorded lectures she would stop and look at the camera and ask what something was that she had written. (“Look, lady, I”m hanging on by my fingernails. I got no idea.”) Then she’d answer the question. What she had written was an explanation of the Standard Model and the quarks with their spin! (Can’t do that with vectors. No, no. no… What’s Amy Winehouse doing here? Nevermind.)

I like Ms. Furey. I mean imagine being the journalist interviewing her and he’s looking at the bruises on her arms. “How did you get them?”, “Fighting. I like to do mixed martial arts. Especially karate.” 

“What would you be doing if you hadn’t gotten this professorship at Cambridge?”

“Playing accordion. Busking in New York.”

So here the thing I finally understood about matrix algebra. Order of operations is important. I mean I kind of got that in college but was left with a, “So what?” Felling (thought?)

It was follow up lectures on octagons and quadragons that I finally understood. 

It was a follow up lecture I watched where a guy was talking about quadragons and described taking your arm from a bent position to straight and then some other position. There were three steps. The order in which you did the steps determined whether the hand ended palm up or palm down.

So, how does this relate to tee shirts you ask? Good question.

Most tee shirts I own now have a tag on the inside left seam, near the bottom.

So what’s the likelihood that you will put the tee shirt on correctly, if you are in the dark and can’t see the tag?

This presupposes that what one would do in the light is look for the tag and orient the shirt such that when it slips on over your head that tag would be on the inside, left side.

I think the chances are one in four that you get it right. However, like the arm twisting experiment I think it takes three moves to correct an incorrect placement, and an incorrect placement is due to an incorrect order of operations. If you start with the tag to the outside you’re screwed. If you start with it on the inside you have a one in two chance of getting it right.

I’m not sure, but you can also put the shirt on backwards, either inside or out. Incorrect order of operations?

Doesn’t the orientation of the shirt front to back bring the odds to 8 to 1, not 1 in 4?

Or are certain situations in the 1 in 8 scenario not possible?

More to think about.

Gotta go.

But before I do, here’s a classic thought experiment by Einstein.

You have two hydrogen atoms. Let’s label them A1 and A2.

You have a box with two compartments: C1 and C2.

The atoms can be in either of the two compartments.

They can both be in the same compartment.

What are the odds of any situation?

Okay, here’s the classic solution:

What are the situations: A1&A2 in C1; A1&A2 in C2, A1 in C1 and A2 in C2, A2 in C1 and A1 in C2.

There are four situations. Therefore, there is a one in four chance of any situation happening.

Right?

Wrong.

It’s one in three.

What?

Reason. You can’t label an atom. One hydrogen atom looks like another. You have no way of knowing A1 from A2. Therefore the last two situations collapse into one situation and the situations are reduced to 3 possible. The odds are 1 in 3.

Want to try the Monte Hall Paradox? (Should you switch or not?)

Answer: always switch.

Now, I’m outta here.

Tuesday May 18, 2021

Marjorie Taylor Greene is being reported (hailed?) as the face of the Republican Party. Some are aghast. I ask, “Why?” As in “Why are you aghast?”

They, the Republicans, have been working for this moment for decades. This is who they are and who they have been for years. Fox News just put them on rocket fuel to get here quicker.

Some might want to stop and consider if they want to follow an unhinged lunatic, but they’ve already decided that. They did when they elected Trump. ( I was cleaning up some old files and ran across articles about the 2016 election being rigged and stolen – by Republicans. Why did Ohio turn off the security on their voting machines? And questions like that. )

Years after Pavlov, another person (Russian I think) did experiments to bring out various traits in dogs. He could bred a dog to be mean or gentle. Same breed, different outcome. One or two generations was all it took.

I’ve got to wonder if this isn’t what has happened to the Grand Olde Party. But then again there was always an undercurrent of racism and a cheat to win attitude.

Things have gotten bad in Israel. Two questions: 1) Will Israel stop stealing land from the Palestinians and building settlements on it? 2) Will Hamas stop shooting rockets into Israel?  

No and no? Okay, then cue “Blowing in the Wind.”

I gave a talk yesterday on Egypt to my niece’s third grade class via a Microsoft type Zoom link. I was wondering at what level I should aim the talk. It’s hard to know when everyone is a little screen on your computer. At the end, the first question I got was on Khufu’s boat, discovered at the base of the Great Pyramid in 1954, “Was the boat named after Ra?” Good question. I don’t know. I think I aimed my talk a little too low. Turns out archaeologists aren’t sure either. Could be.

I’m also reading a book on quantum physics. The intro to the book, actually the first chapter, which was an intro to the subject, was the author noting that although he had studied physics in college and had gone on to a long career in Astrophysics, he never really understood quantum physics and in particular Bell’s Theorem. 

He realized that in much of his college career there were things he didn’t really understand, but he could get by because he could do the homework and spit back whatever he had heard. But understanding? Especially on quantum physics and Bell’s Theorem in particular? No real understanding.

How refreshing to hear someone say that!

I remember teaching a course in C Programming and the Unix Operating System. I got to the slide explaining how the operating system transferred control to the compiled C program when I realized I had no idea. Up until that moment, I thought I knew. I looked out at the faces of the students waiting for me to tell them something, when I realized I didn’t understand it.

I was lucky. I called a break because I told them there was something I didn’t understand and needed to check out.

Fortunately, this point is a sticking point with a lot of people (I think, because time is spent explaining it).

The Operating System passes three values to the about-to-run C program. 

Two of those values are addresses to another place in the computer’s memory. In those two places are lists of other variables and their values. What are those two places named? They aren’t. And that is where I was hung up. 

Boy do I remember that feeling of not knowing and that realization.

To understand what you don’t know with enough specificity that you can go try and look for an answer is a terrific thing. It starts with a realization. A realization that you don’t know something.

In other stuff, The Supreme Court is going to hear an argument from a case in Mississippi designed specifically to challenge and hopefully (in the eyes of what are now called conservatives) overturn or sharply restrict Roe v Wade.

I wonder if they will do it? And I wonder what the reaction will be?

Ah me. Will have decades to find out.

I watched a little bit of a show called “Unexplained and Unexplored.” The god awful show where two bros go wandering around the world looking for answers, find none and move on to the next episode. There’s the guy with the slick backed black hair. He’s always got this serious looking face. I especially like it when he asks a really dumb question and can maintain that look. Maybe, it’s botoxed in? I dunno. Okay, I’m being unfair. The questions he asks, in and of themselves, aren’t dumb. The problem is that they are questions that people have been asking for years and to get any understanding you’d have to demonstrate a little more knowledge. It would be akin to asking Eric Clapton if you could have a 30 minute lesson from him and would that let you play like him? Well, maybe…?

So here’s the show’s formula of scenes:

Opening – “I’m slick backed hair guy with a perpetual serious look on my face. I call myself a world explorer. Joined by my friend, the guy who jumps in with a possible answer at just the right moment, we are determined to solve some of the world’s biggest mysteries by reading maps. We call them ancient maps. If we could just read them …”

Middle scenes – Following an intense discussion between us we determine that there is something mysterious and many people have tried to solve the mystery. We are going to solve it. We are going to read a map. There are places on the map that are mentioned in the mystery. Let’s go to those places and we’ll start by enlisting an expert to mention a few things to us.

Then I will give him my very serious look while I ask a seemingly ludicrous question like “Is that where the treasure is buried?” Or “Could this be the meaning of life?”

Because this expert is getting paid he says, “Could be.”

Late middle scenes – We go diving, digging, or hiking. We look at things. We point to them. We wonder, “Could this be it?” (Answer: “Could be.”)

We get very excited!!! This could be it.

Last scene – We may have found … Yes, that is it. We found it. But we don’t have time, gotta go. Onto the next adventure.

The episode I was watching was looking for where the ancient Egyptians can from. (Answer: Out of the Western Desert. The Sahara used to be a savannah, but things changed. It dried up. They moved to the Nile. But let’s see what the bros discover.)

I got seven minutes in and had to take a breather.

I think my two bros should tackle quantum physics. “Do you think this is what causes quantum entanglement?” (Could be.) 

What about Bell’s Theorem? “To find out we consult ancient black boards, and books.” Then we go somewhere to talk to somebody who has spent their whole life trying to answer the question we will pose questions to him (or her).

“You know Bell’s Theorem is really hard to understand.” (“Yes, I know.”)

“Do you think you could explain it to us?” ( – Are you friggin’ kidding me? You guys are idiots. – “Well, I can try.” )

“You know Bell’s Theorem is really hard to understand.”  (“Yes, We’ve been over that.”)

“We’ve got like 30 seconds for you to explain this, then we have to go dig, dive, or wander around.” (“Okay, perfect Bell’s Theorem is spelled B-E-L-L and it is the key to understanding quantum physics.”)

Time for slick back hair guy’s serious face stupid question, “So if we understand Bell’s Theorem we understand quantum physics?” (“You could say that.”)

“Okay, gotta go investigate, do you think the Hadron Collider is in use? We want to see if we can turn hydrogen and oxygen into water or the other way around.” (“It probably is in use, but you never know. By the way, you can do what you claim you want to do with a high school chemistry set.”)

“What? And miss a scene of me pushing a button on the collider and looking in the area where atoms collide?”

Confession time – I’m really pissed and envious that these two get all kinds of cool equipment and time to go do this stuff.

I finished watching the Egypt episode. I was thinking about the shots. There’s the drone shot of them in the car. The conversation in the car shots. (What is that two cameras mounted on the side of the windshield inside the car? And don’t forget the camera in the back for the 3/4 head shot and the looking down the road shots. Then they get side scan sonar to do a grid search of the Red Sea. There’s dive equipment. There’s all the places they went and people they got to interview. 

So to conclude their answer to the question, “Where did the ancient Egyptians come from?”

They ask a guy who shows them a mound and says it’s the first pyramid in Egypt and it is from Dynasty 0.

Cool. Where should we go next?

Hatshepsut’s temple.

I’m interested in this because I want to see the temple. On the walls are pictures and hieroglyphs that talk about Hatshepsut sending an expedition to “the Land of Punt.” 

The bros go. The bros see. The expert there says that the Hatshepsut’s trip was by boat on the Red Sea for 40 days.

It was interesting to learn that the conclusion of it being on the Red Sea by my bros was based on the sea creatures depicted on the wall. They are creatures from the Red Sea. (Of course, if they could have red the glyphs they might have now this too..but.)

Okay, now the bros decide to drive to the Red Sea. There’s a road that take them there! How exciting! This route has been used for thousands of years. And by driving and drone shot we see they are getting close! They suppose that when they get to the end of the road there will be a town, which could serve as a port. Brilliant! No one ever thought of that before. (Yeah, right.)

They get to the port. Get a boat. Drop a side sonar and they find wrecks on the bottom of the Red Sea. They dive. They conclude that because the first wreck is made of iron it’s not what they are looking for. Totally brilliant. The second wreck is at 200 feet, beyond their level of clearance. They send the fat older dive masters to look. Serious slick back hair guy is on the two way mic topside. “What’s your depth?” Fascinating. Then they lose radio contact! OMG, can you stand it! Then the diver are back in radio range. They’ve taken pictures. They think the bros will like them. They show amphora, the ancient two handle pointy bottom containers used in the ancient world to hold wine or olive oil. Boy are the bros excited! This proves that this port was used by Hatshepsut! (What? Wait. No. It shows that a boat that was from ancient times sank here. That shows that this place two miles off the coast of the place where you just were was no doubt used in ancient times. You could have asked somebody who knows about this stuff and they could have told you that.)

Amazingly they go talk to someone who knows something and he shows them what they found in the Red Sea in an old wreck. Wow.

So the land of Punt is thought to be at the very end of the Red Sea and this is what the bros conclude and so the ancient people that settled Egypt must have come from there. On to the next adventure.

Wait. Let’s review a few basics. Like Dynasty 0 or Dynasty 1 was like 3,000 BCE and Hatshepsut was 1,500 BCE. So what happened in the intervening 1,500 years? You know like Hat was in Dynasty 18, you skipped a sh*tload of dynasties, pharaohs and what not.

Oh well, I got to see the hieroglyphs on Hatshepsut’s temple of the trip to Punt.

PS The kid at Fun City. Actually, it’s two crane machines that you can try to pick up a plush toy and drop it in the hole. So exciting. At a rest stop in Maryland on the way to see the grandchild.

Sunday May 16, 2021

Two articles I have read about the pandemic are illuminating.

One was in Wired magazine, the other in Time.

Wired pointed out that the thinking of WHO and the CDC was that the virus spread via sneezing, coughing and touching one another. The recommendation was to keep six feet apart and to test and wipe down surfaces. None of this was really helpful. Therefore the virus spread.

What they failed to realize was that the virus was airborne and that’s how most people became infected. If they had started by insisting everyone wear masks and had they done things to improve ventilation systems the results would have been hugely different.

The crazy thing is they were told. By scientists! But they ignored them. Why? They knew better, or so they thought. 

Even when presented with evidence they ignored it. The people who knew and understood how the virus spread had to go on a campaign to convince the CDC and WHO. Finally, both organizations relented and posted on their websites to wear a mask. No big press conference, no giant announcement, just a change on the website. They did this only recently!

Why? Why not make a big deal and tell everyone? Out loud, big and imposing? I’ll tell you why. They are human. 

Doctors and experts can be particularly hard to convince of something if they’ve been taught something else. And they were told something else. For years.

It turns out that this virus can hang in the air for a long time and travel a great distance from the source. Also it’s small enough to get past most of the body’s defenses and then lodge deep in someone’s lungs. 

That first sentence in the above paragraph “that this virus can hang in the air for a long time and travel a great distance from the source” is what they didn’t understand. They pooh-poohed and ignored those who were trying to tell them differently. Why? They knew better. At least, they thought they did. They were wrong. And the people telling them weren’t in the inner sanctimonious circle.

I can think of many times when this has been the case. Remember ulcers? Yeah, doctors said to drink milk and there was nothing else to do. People were having all kinds of problems with stomach ulcers. Then a guy figured out that it was actually something else and an antibiotic would take care of it. 

Or how about Watson and Crick? Linus Pauling did most of the work on the DNA molecule but he couldn’t get it to fit together. Either Watson or Crick’s wife was a sculptress and she started to make the now famous model. Then the two said, “What if the valence of one of the elements was wrong?” Wrong by one electron. Bang! The whole thing fit together. The chemistry books had been wrong. Wrong for decades and decades.

This kind of thing happens all the time.

Remember bleeding and being bled? No, of course not, that was the 1700s.

Or germs and baby doctors? Women knew that if they went to the hospital rather than see a midwife at home it was more likely their baby would die. Why? The doctors weren’t washing their hands or changing their clothes after examining cadavers. Germs.

Or The British Navy and scurvy? Captain Cook ordered his ship kept clean and everyone was to eat a lime, lemon, or orange at least once a week. The result? None of his men died of scurvy. The accompanying ship did not do that and they died like flies. ( dropped? ) So what did The British Navy do based on the evidence? Nothing, for seventy years. Tradition you know.

Okay the other article was the interview with Michael Lewis. He’s got a new book out. This one on the pandemic. There were these doctors who had evidence of what was causing the virus to spread, different than the ones mentioned in the Wired article. They were ignored. Thought to be fringe. But they were right. His point, or at least one of them, is that we don’t really have a national health care system in this country. At least not a coordinated government coordinated system. He asks the question if we were invaded by say Russia would we ask Alabama and Mississippi to do their best and let us know how they made out? No, of course not. Yet, that is what Trump did. 

Imagine if WHO and the CDC had listened to the scientists that knew instead of saying they knew better based on a false narrative that had been circulating since the 1930s? Imagine if we had a Federal government that was run by competent individuals, career people, not some political appointee who blows in for eighteen months or two years? Imagine if we had had a national and International response immediately like someone did when ebola was blowing up in Africa. What was his name? 

Link to the Wired article:

https://www.wired.com/story/scientists-need-to-admit-what-they-got-wrong-about-covid/

Time link:

https://time.com/6039425/michael-lewis-the-premonition-covid-19/

Saturday May 15, 2021

My hometown minister once asked my brother, “Can you think of a new sin?”

I’m not sure why he asked, but the point is pretty clear. There ain’t no new sins.

Rachel brought up that point last night. Our Postmaster General has pulled the same scam that Spiro Agnew pulled in the 70s. Extortion via a bonus scheme to his employees. In the case of Agnew contractors gave their employees a check marked “Bonus.” The employee cashed the check and brought the cash to their boss who gave it to Agnew. In the case of DeJoy, he gave his employees bonuses so they could contribute to political campaigns that he designated. This is illegal. Yet, DeJoy is still Postmaster General.

We now have a tape of a woman from The Heritage Foundation outlining exactly what they are doing with the voter suppression laws they are trying to pass. It’s not new. It’s voter suppression. But people don’t like that term so we’ll call it voter integrity, okay? 

Matt Gaetz’s wingman has apparently flipped. I thought he was up on 70 counts, turns out to be in the 30s. His pleas deal is to plead guilty to 6 and they’ll let the other 27 slid. If he screws up and doesn’t tell them everything the 27 are back on the table. If so he’s looking at life or most of it, behind bars. If he takes the deal he’s looking at ten years. Gaetz is probably looking at ten years too. Nothing new here. My suggestion to Gaetz, join the Taliban in Afghanistan. There you can take a bride that is eleven years old. Hum, I wonder how long the Butthead of our Congress could survive there? Maybe, ten years isn’t so bad?

Meanwhile, the age that someone has to be to be vaccinated has dropped to 12. Wow. If we could get everyone 12 and up vaccinated in this country… In Ohio, Mike DeWine is having a million dollar lottery every week for five weeks for everyone who is vaccinated in his state. It will be interesting to see if that persuades some of the people on the fence.

In Congress, some Republicans are claiming the Jan 6th insurrectionists were just like any other tourist group. I covered that already.

Also, there are a few Republicans who are leaving the fold, or threatening to do so. They aren’t moderates. They claim to be conservatives. Real conservatives. What does that mean? When people like Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney are being held up as examples of moderation and good (what? “Goodness?” good Goodness? I don’t know what to call it). We’ve got problems.

But then again this is what happens in political movements that veer too far off course. The radicals of yesteryear are the moderates of today. Look at the French Revolution. Then comes the dictator.

We’ve been watching the Ken Burns documentary on Hemingway. Fascinating and captivating.

I’ve been reading “Enchanted Vagabonds” A book that outlines the adventures of a couple who sailed out of San Diego Harbor in 1933 in a 16 foot homemade kayak/canoe/sailboat and went 16,000 miles down the Baja coast to the Sea of Cortez and finally to Panama. Yikes: sharks, storms, bugs, snakes, scorpions, etc.