Interesting week

This week had four disasters in it. What's happening here? Is this because a war might happen? First someone uses pepper spray in a nightclub and 21 people die trying to trample out of the place. Then an airplane crashes in Iran killing 302 people. This morning the pyrotechnics got out of control in a Providence, RI, nightclub and the flames spread to engulf everyone inside in minutes. A barge being refueled on Staten Island explodes, producing scenes from Manhattan that looked eerily like Planeattack.

In particular, there has to have been lots of nightclub violations in the past few years in the US, but no disasters. Then all of a sudden we get two at once. Perhaps the nightclubs will clean up their act.

Close the School or Not?

Along with much of the East Coast, the Great Snowstorm of 2003 has caused poor roads around here and resulted in some of the local public school systems being closed for several days. Today, the temperature went to around 50, causing a lot of melting. Therefore, most of the school systems are opening tomorrow. But not School System H. SSH decided to remain closed tomorrow, and the local talk show host on radio ridiculed the situation. He says if that if we do that, then we need to send kids home when it rains because they might get wet, or not have school in the autumn because the falling leaves could attack the students. He said that ice is not melting at 56 degrees F in SSH. A caller said that she spun around 180 degrees twice when navigating roads in H. So which is it? Does H close the schools tomorrow or not? Note that if H does close the school, five days will be permanently lost.

To me this looks like a decision between opening the schools and having the kids become injured intellectuals, or keeping them closed and having them become safe idiots. So which is it, H? Injured intellectuals or safe idiots? I don't think I could decide that one.

Cat on the Door Step

This morning I saw a cat on our back yard deck steps. Our cat was on the sill glowering at it. The cats look much alike, blotchy white and tabby with some orange, more on that cat than on ours. The other cat stares at the squirrels in your yard. With the cat around there is not a bird in sight, even though we have filled the bird feeders. I click my fingers on the bay window pane. The cat turns its head around and glowers at me. It is staring at me with a couple of big fat beautiful green eyes. Then it goes to the back of the yard and disappears. The birds return.

Skyjacking and carjacking

In the book Predicting New Words, by Allan Metcalf, the nonword skyjacking is mentioned. This word was coined about two to three decades ago to describe the hijacking of aircraft. We almost never use the word anymore. However, we do use carjacking a lot. What's the difference? According to Mr. Metcalf, it is because skyjacking has a cute pun, sky versus hi, making light of a serious subject. According to Mr. Metcalf, "cute" or "clever" words almost never survive. Words need to settle in the language unnoticed. Carjacking has survived because there is no such pun; it simply describes the objectionable practice of forcing someone out of a car and taking their car. If so, then what's wrong with planejacking? Why hasn't that appeared in our language?

If it hadn't been for France

Some people are saying the French are being ungrateful because they oppose the upcoming war against Iraq. They say that we saved the French from German occupation iin World War II and now they are being ungrateful by opposing the US. That is a specious argument if I ever saw one. The French has given us a favor. If it weren't for the French, we'd be depositing our paychecks at Benedict Arnold National Bank. Viva la France!

Fire Department Effectiveness

How effective is the fire department? Do you measure it by the number of fires it puts out? If so, the people of the fire department will set fires, and then put them out. Similarly for bioweapons experts. How many bioattacks do they successfully counter? Measure them like this, and they will set an attack, and then counter it. In this case, though I believe the goal was to bring attention to bioweapons research.

Perhaps the military should be the same way. Measure the effectiveness of an army and its government by the number of wars that it wins? If so they will purposely set wars to show everyone how well it can win them. I read somewhere that the fire department is best rated by the number of fires it prevents. Maybe the military and government should be rated by the number of wars it prevents. But I don't see much war preventing except from places like "old Europe".

Snowstorm caused a meltdown?!

Tonight I heard a reporter on CNN saying that the huge snowstorm that we had this weekend caused the transportation system in the Northeast US to experience a meltdown. That's right, a meltdown. This is yet another hyper word that has been worked up by the hypermedia ever since the Three Mile Island incident of 1979. Well, they really made a boner this time. That's exactly what I want, a meltdown! I want all this sleet, freezing rain, and snow to melt down and give us back our transportation system. Fortunately, the weather people predict a meltdown this week, with temperatures in the 50s melting all this stuff off the roads.

The Blizzard of 2003

I saw it coming on the weather reports; in fact, from the GFS model, I had seen this one two weeks in advance. This does not mean I like it in any sense. This storm came in with rain, then it started sleeting for two days. They predicted 12-18 inches of snow, but we got only about 2 inches of ice and sleet. It was not the easiest thing to shovel. It was like a steamroller, wiping out one event after another that I wanted to go to, a telescope open house, a valentine dance, a church service, and a board meeting of an organization where I am an officer. It made it a lonely, cabin-fever weekend. I did get out to shovel snow and run to the main road to see what condition it was in. These events (except for the church service) have been rescheduled, are now going to crowd my next two weeks to the hilt.

The Board of Supervisors Problem

This is the case involving having to wait a long time for an event to happen. It can be for a haircut where you are told only that it will be a long wait, a place where you select numbers for waiting in line, or a court case or government body case which is in a huge docket of cases. Let's take the last one for an example. Suppose your development is concerned about a developer next door building lower cost homes and your neighborhood is afraid of plummeting market values of its homes. So your development is going to challenge their petition at the Board of Supervisors meeting to change the zoning to apartments, say. It is schedule for some night, but you are afraid that it will take a long time before the case comes up. Let's say it will come up sometime between 7 pm and midnight. So you say, I won't come at 7. I'll come in at 10 and save some time. But you are afraid they may pull a fast one on you and bring it up at 9. Then you'll miss it. What should you do?

It depends on your attitude to the supervisors. You could observe the past history of cases similar to your own and find out what the most likely time is for your case to come up. If it is 10, then you will arrive at 9:45. But suppose you don't have such a history, or you have had bad luck with situations in the past and believe that the system is out to make things the most miserable on you as it can.

In that case it is a 2-person zero-sum game. The theory of such games was worked out about half a century ago. Some of these games have what is known as saddle points, or Nash equilibria (mentioned in the beautiful movie A Beautiful Mind, which came out in 2002). In these equilibria, if you deviate from the solution, you will do worse. Well is there such an equilibrium in this case? You come in at midnight, because you feel that the system will make you wait a long time and delay the thing as much as it can. So then it decides to make it at 8 o'clock, to make you miss it. Seeing this, you want to come in at 8. But it decides to make it 7 instead to make you miss it. So you come in at 7. So then it makes it midnight to make you waste 5 hours of your time. And this thing goes on indefinitely. It is clear that this game has no saddle points.

In such a case, game theory says you should use a random device to determine what you are going to do. That keeps the other side guessing. But with what probabilities should you make the times to be? There is a well-known procedure for solving this, using linear programming. I set up the problem using 33 discrete times on an Excel spreadsheet and solved for it. The solution is this: with some high probability, come in on time. In the above example, arrive at 7; that is, on time. If you draw the other probability, then draw completely at random from all the possible hours, making the later hours more likely. How high a probability should you come on time? It depends on how much you value not missing the case versus wasting your time. Roughly speaking, how long a wait in hours must it be before you are indifferent between waiting that time and missing it? Say it is H hours. Then with probability H/(H+1), arrive on time; else draw completely randomly an arrival time. It turns out this is not a good game to play; missing the event is too likely, and you are apt to wait a long time. But this is the best you can do.

Now suppose everyone in the neighborhood follows this rule. Then a huge bunch, maybe 2/3 of the development, will come in on time to support their cause. While the other cases are going on, other people from the development will dribble in a little at time, with the frequency increasing as the night wears on. A few will miss it, when the case comes up and those who selected later times lose out. The last time I went to such a hearing, I did indeed observed this type of behavior to some extent. So game theory in this case had the power to predict accurately what people will do.

Reclaiming the Night Sky

In the beginning was the Big Bang, and then the galaxies and stars were created. The stars lived their lives and exploded, scattering life-stuff all over the place. Some of it came together to form our own blue and white planet, along with a star for it to orbit. If we walk out on our planet-home at night with no clouds or moon and look up, we can see the stuff from which we were created.

Or maybe we can't. More likely the pale light of Sirius is drowned out by the blaring lights of a garish auto dealership; the delicate glow of the celestial road of the Milky Way is hidden from our sight by the line of screaming blaring light on the roads of the suburban business district. More and more the lights of our homes, our institutions, and our highways are blinding us to the glories of the universe. That includes the lights of my, the lights in your subdivision and your home, and the lights at my home. There is light pollution all over the place. It is time we reclaimed our night sky. It would be nice if for two hours, the entire nation, or at least half of it, could turn out its lights so we can see the night sky.

A high school student from Midlothian, Virginia, is trying to get us to do just that. She is Jennifer Barlow, and her web site is http://www.nationaldarkskyweek.htmlplanet.com I found out about this energetic, enterprising young woman through the Richmond Astronomical Society I belong to, and she gave a talk to our group on Monday night. She has declared the week of 2003 April 1-8 to be National Dark Sky Week, and is asking us to turn out all outside lights and bright indoor lights between 10 pm and midnight every night during this week. I feel that this is a good way to get to know and appreciate the night sky. So therefore I urge us to turn out our lights during this time. Perhaps we could urge our neighbors and community associations to take part in this endeavor. This is our view of the Cosmos that is being ruined - the Universe from which we all came. So I urge us all to take part in this project this April.

September 11 Ambiguity

For a while I have been saying that one should not call Planeattack, the terrorist attacks of 2001 September 11, "September 11". This is because it maligns people who were born on a September 11. But there is another reason, too. "September 11" is inherently ambiguous. 57 days of my life have been called "September 11". This is why a major event should not be referred to by its month/day date. I found a headline in the newspaper this morning that read "Terror threat greatest since September 11." Which September 11? Both are plausible. 2002 September 11 was the last time that an Orange terrorism state was declared. 2001 September 11 was the date of Planeattack. The headline should have read "Terror threat greatest since terror attacks of 2001", or "Terror threat greatest since Planeattack", provided enough people understand "Planeattack". So please don't call the terror attacks of a year and a half ago "September 11". There's been another September 11.

Politician Logic

It seems that much of what politicians say are lies. There are Clinton's denials of involvement with Monica, Nixon's denial of involvement in Watergate, Saddam's denial of possession of weapons of mass destruction, US Government's denial of health problems caused by nuclear testing in the 1950s, and so forth. It makes me think that there is a separate logic to people in power that says that the statements they make are false. An example of this logic would be:

Hypotheses:
1. A prominent US politician says that Iraq has biological weapons.
2. A prominent British politician says that Iraq has chemical weapons.
3. Saddam says that Iraq does not have any chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons.

Conclusion:
Iraq has nuclear weapons.

Proof: In this type of logic we assume the negation of the hypotheses because, since they come from politicians, they are false. Therefore, Iraq does not have biological weapons from 1, and does not have chemical weapons from 2. Number 3 says that Iraq must have at least one of these, but since it does not have chemical or biological weapons, it must therefore have nuclear weapons. QED.

Remember now that the conclusion is reached only if the hypotheses are assumed.

Missing the Demonstration

I thought the Valentine Tree service we had at our church on Sunday was one of the better services of the year. We honored the people that meant the most in our lives by constructing a tree that bore love hearts. We also had some great music - Lydia Adams Davis playing "Song of Life". I bought one of her CDs afterwards and played some of her music on the way to a meeting tonight. I heard some other good tunes, such as "There's a Moon out Waiting for You", but what struck me the most was "Did I Miss the Demonstration?" It was the lament of a Vietnam War veteran, S. Brian Wilson, whose legs were cut off by a train during a demonstration in 1987.

She sings about the splitting noise of helicopter blades, whether he would live through it all, and the blood on his hands from the people he killed in Vietnam - soldiers, women, babies, and elders, to a movie that readily caught my ear. The person she is singing about this has written several moving pieces of prose on the Internet. The song has meaning to us now because our government is about to engage us in yet another conflict - Persian Gulf War II. What will happen in this war?

I received an email today that said a study was made of this war using various mathematical formulas. It estimates US casualties at about 79 and Iraqi casualties as about 3000 with a max possible of about 19,000. It does not make any estimation of civilian dead. It predicts the US will win.

Maybe so, but I regard it as too dangerous. France, Germany and Russia are seeking to block US efforts. They are trying to prevent a war from taking place, and are trying to maneuver things so that the dispute can be settled diplomatically, perhaps with Saddam getting exile and Iraq becoming a UN protectorate or something else. This is because war is horror no matter how it takes place. The best that can happen is a wild prosperous oil party for America in the middle of this decade. The worst that can happen is a tremendous catastrophe. Is it worth taking the risk?

Lydia should sing this song everywhere she goes now until this crisis is settled. I don't know of any case where a song stopped a war, but maybe it will work this time. I think she should give it a try.

SUUSI schedule

The Winter NUUS of SUUSI, the mountain retreat that I go to every summer, is out. The nature schedule is already out. I really enjoyed a trip to Dismal Falls last year. So I was disappointed to find that you have to be a woman to go on such a hike this year. The only Dismal Falls hike listed was Dismal Women. However, Falls of the Little River was listed for Friday (July 25) and since that was a good trip a few years ago, I will pick that one. I also met a singer (http://www.LydiaAdamsDavis.com) who I think would be fantastic at SUUSI, so I referred her to that place. I don't know if I will see her there, but I like her children's songs and loved the two songs she sang at today's service.

The Valentine Tree

My congregation had an interesting service today. To demonstrate our love for someone, we were each given a pen and a Valentine red heart, and asked to write down someone who meant a lot in your life. I put down my piano teacher when I was 7 years old, since she introduced me to the world of music. We then all got up and put our hearts on a tree up front. Afterwards, the tree looked like it had born Valentine fruit. But you can't plant one of those hearts and hope to get a Valentine tree. It is love among all of us that grows the tree.

A Proof that Shoots its own Foot

Recently I began to get interested in odd perfect numbers. A perfect number is one that is equal to the sum of the divisors less than it. For example, 28 is divisible by 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, and 14 and these numbers sum to 28, so 28 is a perfect number. Euler proved that a number that is of the form 2ⁿ*(2ⁿ⁺¹-1) is perfect, and that all even perfect numbers are produced from this formula for some n. It is not known if an odd number can be perfect; it would have to satisfy so many conditions that it would make a lawyer's head swim. But no one has proved that there isn't one.

So it surprised me when I found one on the Internet! The number is 198,585,576,189. This number's factorization is 3²*7²*11²*13²*22,021. It can easily be shown that an odd perfect number has to be an odd prime times a square number. This number certainly has this form, provided of course that 22,021 is prime. It is not readily obvious that 22,021 is prime; it looks like it may be. The interesting thing about it is that if you assume that 22,021 is prime, then you can show that 198,585,576,189 is indeed a perfect number. But when doing this, you do something else that undermines this proof altogether. The proof that 198,585,576,189 is perfect also implies that 22,021 is not prime! In fact, it shows that 22,021 = 19²*61.

So here we have a case of proving the statement A -> B. But in so doing you also prove A -> ~A; i.e., that A implies not A, the statement that A is false. This destroys the proof altogether, because although it may be true that A -> B, that does not tell us anything, for if A -> ~A, then ~A must be true, and so A is false, so that A -> B is true but only because a false statement implies anything. It is the proof that shoots its own foot.

By the way, the page which shows the number 198,585,576,189 and shows that if 22,021 is assumed to be prime, then the number is perfect, is http://www.primepuzzles.net/puzzles/puzz_111.htm.

Redesign of Blogtrek

I decided to put some pizzazz to my Blogtrek page. I changed the colors of the sidebar and the top, and put a dark blue border around the entire page. This made some black text unreadable, so I changed it to white. Lastly, I designed a graphic meant to suggest infinity, in accord with my personal philosophy of "Just add one." I added in the phrase "...blogging where no one has blogged before...", in accordance with the similarity between Blogtrek and Startrek. Finally, I made the text area white, for maximum readability. The result is a nicer looking page, in my opinion.

Columbia Tragedy: Memorable or Full?

I rate news stories on their effect on the media. I have six ratings: Memorable, Full, Major, Front-Page, News, and Non-News. To qualify as full, the story must cover the entire newscast at night (hence the name full) and must cover half of the front page or more with a headline, but still leave room for the story. A Memorable event is noted by people asking each other in the future, "When were you when ___ occurred?" about the event. It will also fill the entire front page of a newspaper with a headline and will wipe out all other TV programming for at least 24 hours. Planeattack was certainly a Memorable Event. These are rare; so rare that only five have occurred in my lifetime.

So is the Columbia tragedy full or Memorable? It filled much of the front page of the newspaper but it left room for story. It dominated all the networks for times on 2003 Feb 1, but it left room for other programming later in the day. It did fill the entire news program on the 1st, so it is at least full. But is it memorable? I don't think so. Already other programming is coming back and the news coverage was only a few pages in the newspaper. So it rates as a high full event, somewhere between full and Memorable, but not quite memorable. It is about like the Challenger disaster was. But this is an event that we will remember for a long time, probably in the top 10 in my lifetime. I just hope that it does not put an end to space exploration.

The Columbia Disaster

I watched with horror the asteroid-like streaks across the sky on TV that was the remains of Columbia, which catastrophically broke up over the skies of Texas yesterday. It gave me the "not again" feeling, and reminded me of Challenger in 1986. I grieve for those people who went out into space, risking their lives, to extend the depth of human knowledge. The question is whether this is the end of the Space Shuttle or of space exploration. I don't think space exploration should ever end. It may be the one thing that saves our species, and it helps to extend the breadth of human knowledge; look at all we found out about the universe through the Hubble Telescope. But the Shuttle may have seen its last days. There should be one more Shuttle flight - to get the astronauts in the Space Station down. Then it should be considered as to whether we should continue flying this 1970s-technology craft again. A suggestion has been made to do as much through unmanned probes and robots as possible, and to send humans up to space in a small space plane when they are needed. The technology is certainly available to fly an airplane, have it turn into a rocket and fly into space. I think it should be worth considering. In any case, the Shuttle is full of old technology, and we need to get something that is up to date, not premillennium.

Heritage without Hate?

I saw a bumper sticker yesterday when shopping. It read "Heritage without Hate" and it had a Confederate battle flag on it. By this the author of the sticker presumably meant that he intended to celebrate and revere his Confederate ancestry; this is where he came from. He feels the flag symbolizes the heroism that Confederate soldiers displayed during the US Civil War. The problem is that he does not get the message across. I can see his point to some extent; after all, one of my ancestors fought on the Confederate side. But what means one thing to one person means another to another. Many African Americans feel that it does mean hate, even when the originator does not intend that. I feel that such a celebration of Confederate ancestry, including my own, needs to be done in a private manner, and that other heritages are more worthy of celebration. It is like Germans celebrating their heritage by displaying a swastika.

There is even a dispute in Volgograd, Russia, about the name of the place. It was called Stalingrad in one of the most stupendous battles in history, the Battle of Stalingrad in World War II. Many Russians want to change it back to Stalingrad because that is what their ancestors fought for. But like with the Confederate flag, I think this should be done in a more subdued fashion, for Stalin was one of the most brutal men in history. The town should remain Volgograd, naming it after a river, representing our planet Earth - a heritage certainly worth supporting.