The Written Peace: Open Forum of December 27, 2006

A nice open thread is in order. Since Christmas Eve, I have been traveling across the heartland of America. My Jeep broke down along the way. That happened late last night. It was bitter cold, and I was in the middle of nowhere. It was some time thereafter that I lost my Christmas spirit. I could not find decent irony even in the fact that I might die from hypothermia with the effects of global warming so close at hand.

Stupid Winter. Stupid old truck. Damnable repair bill.

So much for a new computer for another six months.

Everything is relative, though. At least I'm not in some secret prison being tortured by the agents of freedom-loving America, and at least I'm not some hapless citizen of Baghdad wondering if a new surge of U.S. troops is going to use more humane methods to lay waste to my neighborhood than the local militias have been.

I have now made it back to my base of operations, and I should like to hear what's on readers' minds. We have plenty of news to discuss.

Former President Gerald R. Ford has just passed away. Although I understand some negative sentiments toward him, I cannot share in anything remotely resembling disdain or dislike for the man who briefly held the Presidency. His tenure was marred by acts contrary to my positions—vetoing the Freedom of Information Act comes to mind—but pardoning ex-President Richard Nixon is not something I hold against him. That said, the silliness about "healing" after Watergate is just so much mainstream media sappiness. Ford was a man of his time, and a certain type of Republican of an unusual time in the arc of modern conservatism.

In that time, a brutal struggle was underway within the GOP. Nixon's impeachment was, in my judgment, not a turning point, but instead merely a post hoc excuse by those within the Republican Party who would ultimately prevail. A relatively moderate (by later standards) wing—call it, if you will, the "Rockefeller Republicans"—played by a set a rules in which civility was important. Gerald Ford was in that wing. So was Barry Goldwater to some extent, despite the character assassination done upon him by Johnson's campaign media geniuses. This civility was a mirror image of that within a strong faction of the Democratic Party. Jack Kennedy was in that wing, but Lyndon Johnson was not.

The viciousness of Joe McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover, and other early monsters of operational modern conservatism became a template for what would much later, in our time, be the ascendant beast that has consumed virtually the entire Republican Party, and Nixon became their very own martyr. Ford kept him from becoming their very own crucified deity.

Somewhat more introspectively, while we're on the subject of who was in which camp of the Republican Party before it became so thoroughly venal, perhaps it would do well to look closely at what was not so bright and sunny within the Democratic Party of the 1950s to the 1970s. Perhaps if LBJ hadn't been, himself, such a mean, overbearing son of a bitch, he wouldn't have found Hoover so useful to keep. And while I'm on the subject of Hoover and the Democrats who let him become a role model for institutional Right-wing insanity, perhaps if John Kennedy had been in some semblance of control of his desire to feed his wealth-and-power domination complex through sexual conquests, Hoover wouldn't have had so much on dirt on him (and just about every member of Congress, too, for that matter) that JFK couldn't stop the wicked FBI director from establishing the foothold of venality that would control Washington D.C. for two generations and teach the Republicans things they needed to know about turning hate from a tool of federal law enforcement into a weapon of Machiavellian power politics.

But that's all speculative with respect to the rise of cruelty in party politics. The Republicans of today have many inspirational leaders; and although they're going to drool over the body of a fundamentally decent man like Ford and make it look like he's what they're really all about, we all know differently. George W. Bush and his neo-con cronies don't hold a candle to Gerald R. Ford and the old, moderate wing of the Republican Party.

For my own part, when warriors depart the battlefield having had their bodies separated from their souls, the time of war with them is over, and honoring them is only right, despite what may have been bloody conflict when they were alive. That is why, despite how much I disagreed with Pope John Paul II on many issues, I could not join the chorus of disrespect for him that swept some parts of Blogosphere Left upon his passing. It is a matter that goes beyond the word "civility" and touches upon the very nature of ideals about what we want from our society.

In that same measure, though, I shall not "honor" George W. Bush when he passes from this Earth, as he surely will some glad day. Such disrespect as I shall hand him during his life and upon his grave every bit as much reflects that 'very nature of ideals' about what I want from this society and what he and his enablers did to diminish the hope of ever achieving them.

Agree or disagree in comments as you feel necessary.

I should turn to other matters. Welcome must be given to new commenters, including Kathy McCarty of the Kathleen McCarty Website, Queen Mum II, Joe, trog69, and snuffy. Some of these good people aren't exactly new around here, but I cannot remember for the life of me whether or not I've ever welcomed them.

Once I have gathered for myself a night's rest and a day's work prepping for next semester, I'll begin the long-planned code and architectural upgrades here, at Big Brass Blog, and at The UnCapitalist Journal. That could get really ugly.

Ah, yes, and about those challenging problems I posted a couple weeks ago in "Scholarly Snippets and Quantitative Quandaries": although readers hit most of the right answers, a few should be provided here, with more to come later. The gravity problem was apparently too easy.

Here's a question for the Isaac Newton fan club. Suppose you're on a sailing ship cruising at a decent speed over the waters. You have a 16-pound bowling ball in your hand, and you climb up the main mast so you can stand with your bowling ball in the crow's nest. Once you get up there, you face the stern (rear) of the boat, which you might recall is flying along at a nice clip, and you drop your bowling ball. Oops. That's going to hurt if it lands on somebody's head.

If someone is standing on the deck, would it be safer to be right below the mast you'd climbed, or would it be safer to stand near the rear of the boat? What's the reason for your advice?

nightshift66 was the first of several, including Minstrel Boy of Harp and Sword, to stomp on that one. It is, indeed, far safer to stand toward the rear of the boat than right under the mast because the ball as it is going down the mast is carrying all of the forward momentum of the ship and the fellow who had just released it. That's conservation of momentum at work: an object in recti-linear motion tends to stay in that motion unless acted upon by a countervailing force. In this case, the only countervailing force would be the air through which the ship is traveling, but even that isn't going to be an issue of any magnitude for two reasons: first, the mass of ball will to a large extent overcome air resistance (as nightshift66 points out); and second, since this is obviously a sailing ship (hence, the mast), it is probably traveling in the direction of the prevailing air current, which means a considerable component of the overall air pattern around that bowling ball will be moving with and at a speed close to that of the ship and everything on it, including the bowling ball, thereby further reducing the air around the falling ball as a 'countervailing force' upon it.

A surprising number of people in the modern world get misled about conservation of momentum because, when an object is thrown out a car window, it seems to lose all of its speed almost instantly, disappearing behind the vehicle as if it has lost all of its forward momentum. That, of course, is simply the result of the object being thrown into a wall of non-moving air, which presents the 'countervailing force' that alters the forward motion.

And while we're on the subject of conservation, the following, fairly well handled by our long-time commenter OddJob, was another problem in that article.

Horace is on a diet, but he's dying to have some delicious pie, so he makes a decision that tomorrow, all he'll eat in a 24-hour period is half-a-pound of pie, and all he'll drink is eight ounces of tasty soda pop. His reasoning is obvious: the total weight of what he consumes tomorrow will be exactly one pound—eight ounces of pie and eight ounces of drink—so the very most he could possibly gain as the result of his one-day excess is one pound. That's all: one lousy pound. And he gets to satisfy cravings that are driving him out of his mind.

Is Horace's logic correct? If not, why not?

Horace is relying upon what is essentially a conservation principle involving weight. If he ingests only one pound of food, then no more than one pound of weight, probably less, could possibly stay in his body and become fat. No matter how you re-arrange atoms and molecules, the resulting atoms and molecules cannot weigh more. The end result of such alterations could have a different density, but not a different weight. Thus, Horace would be entirely correct if all he were to have ingested was one pound; but, unfortunately, he ingested more than one pound through that 24-hour period. In fact, he ingested a whole lot more than merely one pound of food, even though he had no idea that he was doing so.

What was Horace forgetting? Air. Lots and lots of air, which contains oxygen. Air is actually quite heavy. We don't notice its weight for a couple of reasons: first, air pressure on our bodies is counteracted by pressures from within and surface rigidity on the exterior of the body that give us the impression that the air around us is without weight. Moreover, even though air is heavy, its constituent atoms and molecules are not connected like they are loosely in liquids and rigidly in solids. This means air "gets out of the way" very efficiently as we move through it, giving the impression that it isn't a substantial thing, even though it is. That one pound of food Horace ate could very easily become considerably more than one pound of weight gain, not because the food, itself, changes weight, but rather because the constituent molecules of the food have considerable and continuing opportunity to react with the many pounds of oxygen Horace will inhale through the 24-hour period of his experiment. That's why a pound of food can produce metabolic energy and a goodly load of waste products while still having enough punch left over to add some fat to your body.

The moral of the story is clear: if you want to lose weight, not only must you reduce your total food intake, but you must also stop breathing so much.

One more problem solution should be enough for the evening.

Suppose you're in a room with other people. How many people would have to be in that room for there to be a 50-50 chance that someone shared your birth date (month and day)?

A) Fewer than 25 people.
B) Between 26 and 50 people.
C) Between 51 and 200 people.
D) Between 201 and 365 people.
E) More than 365 people.

The answer is A). More specifically, the answer is 23 people. That's right: in a room with only 23 people, there's a (slightly better than) 50-50 chance that someone will have the same birthdate as you. I shall not fatigue you with the mathematics of the solution. Suffice it to note that this is a classic problem in a first course in probability theory that demonstrates how so-called "conditional probabilities" can make actual answers deviate considerably from what "common sense" would otherwise lead people to believe. It is this inaccurate common sense, by the way, that allows all kinds of shenanigans to be used by statisticians, the media, corporations, and even law enforcement officials to mislead the average, even well-informed person to incorrect conclusions based upon uncritical assessment of statements that have quantitative underpinnings. This is the case in everything from "68% of voters identify themselves as 'conservative'" to "this drug test is 99.9% accurate."

If anyone is interested, I should be teaching a stats course again this Summer. Take my course, and you'll come away with quite a different perspective on statistics, probability, and the way numbers are presented as objective when, in fact, numbers are an essential ingredient in many of the best lies we are told these days.


Enough rambling. Leave some comments. Nothing is off-topic here at this bleak outpost on the frontier of a joyless and altogether rather scary new century. If the crowd wants, I'll leave the espresso bar open all night. There should be some relatively fresh chips in the back room, provided Mr. Goat hasn't been back there already and eaten them, and there should be some relatively stale jugs of something that used to be wine under the cabinet, provided blackdog hasn't been prowling around again where he's not supposed to. If the crowd gets rowdy, maybe we'll have a nude breakdancing competition.

Or maybe not.




The Dark Wraith will be back after he's gone out to the parking lot one more time to see if his Jeep looks any different with five hundred bucks worth of repairs on it.