The Fresh Wave of Anti-intellectualism

The Fresh Wave of Anti-intellectualism

Recently on the Internet I have encountered people who take their facts their own way without regard for what happened in the world. Apparently people have taken to making up new realities and writing it down, but they don't bother to call it fiction. I realize that is an ancient custom, but until recently the authors have claimed that one god or another inspired them to write, so it must be true. Sometimes Bacchus inspires me to write, but that only makes it drunken ramblings. No, these recently examples of pseudo-science were not presented as anything except plain fact. Fortunately, no one with any noticeable intelligence took them as factual. 

The first example was on a site that dishes out ancient history. Someone posted on the associated forum ravings about The Ancient Greeks having borrowed their stories from the Ancient Hebrews. That wasn't completely impossible, but The Greeks were a widespread and numerous people, while the Hebrews were a tiny tribe. I suggested that it might be more likely that the Hebrews were influenced by the Greeks, but the poster wasn't willing to accept that. Another post suggested that the Greek Gods were derived from Hebrew sources. I replied that the Greek Gods went back to Proto-Indo-European sources and got a reply to the effect that the Proto-Indo-Europeans had nothing to do with the Ancient Greeks. At this point I confessed that I had wondered for a long time that perhaps I had been transported here from a different world, but that post made the matter certain, because in the world were I am from the Ancient Greek culture and language were derived from the earlier Indo-European culture and language. That person didn't post for several days, when something about the "elohimic games" went up. I didn't bother to respond, nor did anyone else.

While that was going on there were posts on two separate forums to which I belong about the Earth being "fixed" in space and the planets, Sun, and stars orbiting the Earth. As with the Greeks the poster did not mention religion as a source for this foolishness. While there was a suggestion of fundamentalist Christian influence in regard to the Ancient Greeks, The people with the geocentric ideas didn't give any suggestion of anything except their Medieval ideas, and like some Medieval minds they were unwilling to accept that their ideas might be mistaken. Most people find the concept of an accelerated frame of reference easy to understand after things like a ride in a car are described, but that made no impression on these people. I concluded that they were doing it for fun, rather than believing their foolishness; but the expressions were of extreme ignorance and unwillingness to accept facts. A number of good proofs that the solar system is heliocentric were given, including the phases of the Moon, Foucault's Pendulum, precession of artificial satellites, but the facts were of no avail.

If the people who put forth those anti-scientific arguments had been ignorant children, then I would have ignored the whole thing, but the writing was intelligent and mature. The posters were clearly educated, and they were not children. I can't be sure, but I believe that they were Americans. I want to know how they managed to evade education so much that they had the belief that a geocentric universe. Even an elementary science course that touches upon the Solar System would provide enough information to show the geocentric universe to be impossible. A high school science course that included the math would make the idea of a geocentric universe completely absurd. Is it possible that someone could graduate from high school and still believe in geocentricism? I sure hope not. Even if there is some religious cult that teaches geocentricism, that shouldn't be able to outweigh the science. 

But maybe there are religious beliefs that strong, because a non-religious belief has some people believing the canard of anthropogenic global warming. Apparently there are people who think that CO2 is a strong greenhouse gas, and it appears that that leads them to think that AGW is real. I suppose that I shouldn't expect that people would have learned about greenhouse gases in high school, I didn't, but I did learn how to learn. I learned that CO2 is barely a greenhouse gas at all, because the amount of greenhouse potential (ability to hold infrared radiation) is determined by the dipole moment of a gas. I won't go into what that means, but molecules that are symmetrical have lower dipole moments than molecules that are asymmetrical. CO2 is perfectly symmetrical. In addition, there are people who think that humans have put enough CO2 into the atmosphere to do something to the climate. That isn't an absurd idea, but it turns out that human additions to atmospheric CO2 are less than the year-to-year variation, the noise. Since humans are not adding anything that is beyond the "noise", they are not actually adding anything to the atmosphere. (There's an interesting argument there, but I won't go into it.)

The larger question is whether there is a relationship among these examples. Is there a connection among beliefs in AGW, the geocentric universe, and the Greeks deriving their culture from the Hebrews? Well, there is a relationship. Those beliefs show all too clearly a huge lack in education. No one should be able to complete a secondary education anywhere with the concept of geocentricism as anything except an old and disproven concept. No one should be able to complete a secondary education without without a decent understanding of ancient history, along with Medieval and Modern History. No one should be able to complete a secondary education without knowing how to research scientific matters. 

Unfortunately, there aren't many people teaching in primary or secondary education who have much of an understanding of science or history.

The effect of the lack of adequate teachers is that anthropogenic golbal warming is being considered seriously by Congress. I won't go any further than that now, but the lack of actual scientific backing for such laws makes the consideration a waste of time.

The next thing you know, the feds will be thinking that everyone is capable of being educated. That might lead to people with IQ's of 50 getting BA's. What will that do to the value of a BA? That's a little extreme, but the idea that everyone should be getting a high school diploma is almost that bad. Intelligence is distributed in a bell curve, and the people on the lower end are not capable of learning or understanding complicated ideas, and at the extrmeity they are not capable of much at all. It might be a beter idea to accept that everyone can learn and understand to his or her own level and have education that would cater to the spectrum of capabilities. 

We shouldn't expect people with small intellectual power to be certified as educated, but we should want most people to have a good general education that would be well beyond the capacity of the people at the bottom level of intelligence. Similarly, we don't need all that many people to have college educations that add little to their general educations but provide some vocational training.

The Next Great Leap In Transportation

I think that I may have figured out why steam went out of use in transportation. It's too simple, too easy. I used to think of steam engines as a quaint, old-fashioned thing, but recently they came to my attention again in a way that made me go into the matter a little more, and I learned that there were steam engines in the 1920's that had total efficiencies that were as good as or better than most internal combustion automobiles have now. Doble put out models that weighed over 5000 pounds that got fifteen miles to the gallon. That can't be converted directly to what a 1500 to 2000 pound automobile would get, but it is an indicator.

Steam engines for automobiles are lighter, more efficient, more durable, and have fewer parts and less friction than internal combustion engines.
In the past arguments were made against steam that gave steam a bad name. People cited such things as explosions, great weight, slow starting, etc., but those are complaints that go back to the early days of steamboats and early steam railroads. The explosions were caused by large boilers that were filled with super heated steam. For later era automobiles and traction engines there are pipes that are filled with small amounts of steam that goes to the engine then to the condenser. You can't blow one up, even if you try. If you heat the to the maximum and jam the relief valve, then some tubing joints will give out and there'll be a cloud of steam until the boiler runs dry. You wouldn't want to walk into the steam, but it would quickly dissipate. A modern boiler for a steam car is about the size of microwave oven, and there is no large reservoir of steam. Steam stays in tubes that cycle through the engine and back to the water tank.

The engine itself is compact, light, and efficient. To power a passenger car or a pickup truck one would use a bi-directional two piston engine that is less than two feet long and a foot square in cross section, and it weighs less than a hundred pounds. There would be two slide valves for the intake and the piston would act as the exhaust valve. There is a connecting rod from the piston to the crankshaft, and in many models the crankshaft was integral with the rear axle.
There would be a few other moving parts like a water pump, fuel pump, check valves and shut-offs, but there are a few dozen parts instead of the hundreds of moving parts in an internal combustion engine. The difference in the number of moving parts is major, because all those parts create friction, which cuts into efficiency.

Another way that steam engines are more efficient is because they don't need a transmission. Internal combustion engines have a minimum speed, generally about eight hundred or a thousand rpm, below that speed they stall. Steam engines can operate down to one rpm, or even less. In a typical gasoline powered automobile the transmission gears down the drive so that it can be driven at slower speeds. I once discovered that my car went forty MPH at idle speed in high gear. With steam engine you just throttle back the steam, so less goes to the engine, and the engine slows.
There are some sources that give the thermal efficiency of steam engine as 5 to 10 percent, but those figures were for the open pot boilers that were used in steamboats and early railroads Those made no attempt at using water or fuel efficiently. the steam was simply exhausted into the air. Later designs put that stem into use preheating the water and condensed it so that it wouldn't be necessary to reload the water every thirty miles. An even more efficient model could use the exhausted steam to run a lower pressure engine, either piston or turbine, that could provide auxiliary power for lights and other electrical appliances. Either use would act to condense the steam, so that it could return to the reservoir.

Early steam engines also neglected simple fuel efficiency measures that could save lot of fuel. Simply insulating the boilers would greatly reduce fuel usage.
I wasn't around when there were steam cars being made, so I didn't figure out why they all went out of business, and there were a lot of companies in that business over the years. It might be that they tried to do too much. The Doble Steam Car Company in the 1920's was charging $5000 for chassis before the body and engine were added. That was a whole lot of money then, and it would translate into about $100,000 now. There wasn't all that much demand for their product then, because it was in a completely different class from what Dodge, Ford, Chevrolet, and others were building and selling for $1000 or less. If someone had bothered to put the same Uniflow engine into a Model T body, then it could have sold for about $1000 and made money. Today that same engine could be put into a typical car, and the car could sell for a lot less than an internal combustion model, because there are so many add-ons to the engine that are designed to make it burn cleaner and more efficiently. Those add-ons aren't necessary with steam, because it burns at atmospheric pressure, which creates none of the pollutants that are formed in the combustion chamber of an internal combustion engine. And the engine is efficient by its nature.

Many people will disagree with me, but I believe that an inexpensive, safe, clean steam powered automobile could be produced in America and sold for less than most automobiles that are on the market. The technology has been on the shelf for decades, and it is out of patent protection. The steam generators and steam engines that were invented decades ago wouldn't require much research and development. Initially, the engine could be put into cars that already are being made, which would avoid having to go through as many government hoops.

If I were to take an existing car and change it to steam, then it would have to be rear wheel drive, which would also allow for there to be a disconnect in the drive-train and for a limited slip differential, so that the drive wheels could turn at different rates on turns, etc. Steam cars had a reversing switch, which reversed the crankshaft, and that would have to be included, and it might be possible, or desirable, to install a two speed transmission (normal and high speed) that might make high speed driving even more efficient. Otherwise, modern brakes, steering, etc. would be perfectly good for a steam car. Electrical generators could run off the crankshaft or from a spent steam turbine, but there would be less electricity needed for engine operation.

Fuel would be more optional than in internal combustion engine, because it would just have to burn, rather than explode in the combustion chamber. In the past kerosene (number 1 fuel oil) was the common fuel; although gasoline (number 0 fuel oil) was often used as the pilot and sometimes used as the general fuel. There is not reason why the boiler couldn't use either of those or a gaseous fuel (propane or natural gas), or anything that could burn. Being flexible on the fuel would be cost efficient, especially if it just meant that the nozzle had to be changed.


There is some information about steam engines on the internet, but not as much as I would like. Try using search terms "uniflow steam engine" and "Doble uniflow engine". There are a few relevant articles in Wikipedia. Unfortunately, there aren't any detiled technical drawings.

Re-inflating

Climate Change: Time to Act

I recently heard someone express that idea that the campaign to try to do something about climate change had been let slide too much, and that the banner should be taken up again. That may be dangerous talk, because it might be possible to make things quite unpleasant, and the idea that human activity has caused climate change is not supported by science. I followed the matter of climate change closely in the 1970's and '80's, but during the '90's I let it slide. When I started paying attention again within the past ten years things had changed, and there were many sincere people who had come to believe that human activity was causing global warming. I was inclined to go along, but I could remember a few decades earlier that there were many people who expect that an ice age was about to begin, and their facts looked good, so I decided to look at the facts, and I entered a quagmire.
There are many pieces of interlocking data that have been put together to "show" that human activity was causing climate change, and most of those items were being taken on faith by reporters and most of the people how talked about the matter. I decided that I wanted to know more than was reported in the general press. The general assertion is that carbon dioxide (CO2) that has been produced by humans was acting as a greenhouse gas that was making the world warmer. There are several items that had to be checked. The first one was whether the surface temperatures were rising, and that one may be unanswerable.

People have only been using thermometers and recording temperatures for a few hundred years, and during that period it is pretty clear that the average temperature has risen, but the end of the "Little Ice Age' was in the middle of that period, so one would expect that temperatures would have risen. For evidence of temperatures in earlier times I had to look at secondary evidence.
From history we know that the Romans grew wine grapes in Great Britain when they occupied that island from 59 BCE to about 450 CE, but wine grapes hadn't been successful there since then, until the late 1990’s; the growing season was not long enough. We also know that there was a Norse settlement on Greenland that fed itself from 1000 CE until sometime in the thirteenth century, and that agriculture there has been extremely limited since then. Greenland hasn't has a harvest of barely to ripen for about eight hundred years, but there are hopes. Thus, it would appear that the temperatures are now about what they were two thousand years ago but not up to levels of eight hundred to a thousand years ago. Other secondary evidence from tree rings, etc. has been ambiguous. From this I concluded that global warming is within the same range as in the last few millennia.
I also looked into whether sea level had changed significantly. The evidence there is ambiguous, because there have been subsidence and land rising in many places around the world. On the Mediterranean Sea, where there have been human made docks for thousands of years, the evidence is ambiguous, but the sea level is around the same as it was when Rome ruled the region. It is higher in some places and lower in other. It is clear that sea level was much lower before 5,000 BCE, but since then it has barely moved.

The next thing that I looked at was CO2 as a greenhouse gas. The news reports never go into the details of what greenhouse gas is and why some gasses are and some are not. It turns out that a greenhouse gas is one that will absorb solar energy and either hold it or re-emit it as infrared energy. The characteristic of a greenhouse gas is that it is a molecular dipole, which means that one side of it has a positive charge and the other side has a negative charge. Most gases are not dipoles, except ones that have asymmetrical shapes. Water is quite asymmetrical, and it is a strong dipole. CO2 is perfectly symmetrical, so it is not a dipole, and it emits very little in the infrared part of the spectrum. Then I looked for how the people who claim that human activity is causing global warming got by that. They are claiming that CO2 stays in the atmosphere for a very long time, so its tiny addition to greenhouse effect is magnified by the time factor. That might be a good explanation, if it weren't for the fact that CO2 cycles through the atmosphere within two years, which still doesn't add up for a gas that has a greenhouse effect that is less than one percent of water vapor's.

Then there is the matter of how much CO2 humans put into the atmosphere. The calculations vary but are in the same range, and it happens to be less than the typical year to year variation of CO2, so it is impossible to say whether there actually is any net additive by human activity.

When I got this far I decided that anthropogenic global warming was a hoax. I have no doubt that the Earth has varied in temperature over time, but the Sun is a variable star; its output varies. The Earth's orbit around the Sun also varies, so there is more or less energy from the Sun getting to the Earth. And there probably are other cosmic facets of the earth's travel that vary, so one should expect the earth's surface temperature to vary. But there is no evidence that human activity has altered climate; although agriculture has altered local weather in some places.

Now I have to figure out a way to get the general media to look at the actual evidence on global warming.

Now

'Now' is an interesting concept, and it has been defined reasonably well for at least the last several millennia, but how well do we understand it, and what does it really mean?

Studies of brain function and perception have shown that there is a lag between stimulus and the brain's reaction to the stimulus. Such a lag is necessary, because impulses have to travel along nerves to the brain, and the electrolytic conduction of nerves is not instantaneous; it isn't even as fast as a current through copper wire. It is likely that sensations from the feet take the longest time to reach the brain, but vision, even though the eyes are extremely close to the brain takes time, because the brain has to process the images that are formed on the retina before it can react to the images. The amount of time that it takes varies from person to person, but the between sensation and brain reaction is about three hundredths (0.03) of a second, with reactions times from 0.035 seconds to 0.045 seconds being more common.

The variation can be seen in the results of the catching a dropped dollar bill test. One person holds while the person being tested holds his fingers away from the bill until it is dropped. When the bill is released, the testee tries to catch the bill. Some people say that no one can catch the bill, but a small percentage can, and those are the people with the reaction time of 0.030 and 0.035 seconds.

The interval between initial sensation and reaction is the period that makes up 'now'. We never see, hear, feel, or perceive in any way anything that takes place outside of that short span of time. The world doesn't actually exist outside of that span; we can see images, energy, and matter that existed before the present now, but those things are gone, only the memories of their existence is in the present now.

I have tried to picture the present in an analogy, but nothing is quite the same. It is kind of like balancing on a rail with nothing in front or behind. The rail is 0.035 seconds wide, which for light is a fair distance, but for humans isn't very far at all. The rail slides forward, or it stands still and events come at us, we can't tell, and I am not sure whether it makes any difference. We live our lives in this band of time, and we can only get out of it through imagination. Memories and artifacts from the past are evidence that there was something before the present band of now, but memories may be defective, and we can never be sure about external evidence, because it might have been altered in some way or planted. We have no evidence that the future is there (or will be there), because there is nothing beyond our band of now, and no memories or artifacts from the future have been brought in its past, our now. The future is pure imagination.

When we speak, we use verb tenses to indicate the past, the future, and now. There are several tenses for the past, because our views toward it vary. Sometime we wish to express that something happened before something else in the past; sometimes we speak of continuing action in the past, and sometimes we speak of things that are simply over and done. There are forms for all of those ways of speaking. When we speak of the future, we often use modifiers, although we can speak directly about the future. So in addition to "I will", we can use "I plan to" and I expect to". Anything said about the future is indefinite, more indefinite the further into the future we project. There are a few different ways of speaking of the present, but fundamentally it comes down to saying "I am..." The present tense refers to things that are actually happening in the band of now that we are living in at a given moment.

In writing there are conventions about tense. Some are good and reasonable, while others are absurd. The most absurd convention about tense in writing is the "Historical Present", which is closely related to "Reportorial Present". The two are related and it appears that the historical version was derived from the reportorial form. At some point in the sequences of now, someone decided that news reporting should be in the present tense. That happened sometime in the last hundred years and was not adopted uniformly, because some news is still written in the past tense. Examples of the Historical Present are somewhat amusing.

It is silly to hear that Eisenhower commands the army at D-Day; Eisenhower has been dead for decades. To hear that once is slightly amusing, but a few minutes of such absurdity is annoying. History hasn't always been written that why. The ancients wrote history as things that happened in the past, and that was true through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, but during the twentieth century the present crept in.

The reportorial present can be even more absurd, especially when it is mixed with a proper time sequence. I have heard news reports that stated that someone "is" involved in an automobile accident, and 'is' taken to a hospital, where he was treated and released. That kind of reporting makes a great statement about itself and about the mental processes of the people who make such reports.


I started this exposition to discuss the use of the present tense in fiction, rather than to consider it in other types of writing, but fiction writing is like historical writing. A work of fiction recounts or retells in written form something that happened. The writer is telling the reader something, but it has been written down, so it clearly has to be an account of past events, even if the fictional time is far in the future of when the reader reads. Just as it is absurd to read the Dwight Eisenhower is invading Normandy today, it is absurd to read an account of an invasion of Planet X that is written in the present tense.

The whole process of telling stories has been around for a few hundred thousand years; although for most of that time it was truly telling, because the story-teller spoke to the listeners, but most of the forms and conventions of story telling have not changed. Story telling is intimately intertwined with language in general and with the linguistic structures. The structure of language is the essence of logic, and differentiation in time and cause and effect are central to logic and to language. Just as people three hundred thousand years ago couldn't listen to a story teller recount a story that happened during the day time during the previous Fall in the present tense, because they could see that it was night in the Summer in a different location, so it was not happening at that moment. Today we don't have a story teller sitting on the other side of the fire recounting events from times past; we have books from which we read; but the book serves the purpose of the story teller. The book sits with light from the fire of the electric light shining from its features, and the book tells us the story. We use a different sense to take in the story, we can read at out own pace and don't have to wait for the storyteller to relieve himself. Now the story teller waits when we have to do something else, but the book is still telling us what was written. The book is already there, so we know that the events being described aren't happening at tis moment; although they be imaginative events that take place in the book's time far in the future, but the events have already been set down, so,like the storytellers story about the migration five years ago, we know that the book already happened; how else could it be written.

Writing a story in the present tense destroys one of the basic assumptions about stories: that it is possible. A story can't be recorded and be happening simultaneously. The people aren't doing whatever there on the page; the page has been printed, so the people did their deeds sometime in the past. To reflect that the events already happened, the story is written in the past tense, just as the story teller told us many thousands of years ago of events that happen in times even earlier, and the story teller didn't lie about when the events occurred; he told us that it was in the past, in the days of his youth or in the times of his father or in the days of his grandfather's youth or in times far past. What has happened has happened, and it probably won't happen again, so make stories make sense, tell them as things that have happened. The story teller that we use today, the book, shouldn't lie as to when something happened by claiming that it is happening at this moment.

Is the End Near?

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This is just a stub. I have to think abou this some more.

The upheaval that would occur if the U.S.A. and the EU fail in their obligations within a short time of each other would be amazing. It might be the end of the modern economic system.

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In addition, an asteroid is expected to graze the Earth next week.
http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Richard_Binzel_on_near_Earth_asteroids_999.html

On

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sm.