Category: Cosmography

Science, philosophy, art, life.

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Cosmography Politics

9/11 – New Revelations

Responding to my piece on 9/11 “Truthers“, reader Jeff Rubinoff had this to say:

I still think that the psychology of conspiracy theorists has a lot to do with it, probably because of the Truthers I know with no skin in the game (Brits, Irish, Slovaks…). A particular kind of (extreme) credulity that thinks it’s worldly cynicism. A sense of superiority that one has the “real truth” while the sheeple haplessly accept the official lies. And a complete lack of either the necessary knowledge to evaluate claims or a consciousness of this ignorance.
I have one friend who insists that WTC and the Pentagon were bombs, that the planes were generated by CGI, that a few bits of wreckage were planted in front of the Pentagon but clearly not enough and in too good a condition to come from an actual airplane attack: the most Byzantine, inconsistent and improbable pile of donkey dung imaginable. Of course, last time I met him he was telling me how he read on the Internet that the Pyramids were designed as chemical reaction chambers to send microwave signals into space, and how he found this “very persuasive.” Oh, and he’s a Holocaust denier.
He also told me once that University education only limits ones mental horizons, whereas the LSD he ingested daily over a similar period of time expanded his.

That’s also true. I was concentrating on the internal contradictions of the America-fearing American, but all conspiracists live with even deeper conflicts. As you say Jeff, they have a powerful faith which they think of as cynicism.

Apparently the official explanation is that WTC7 just blew itself up (Photo: Damon D’Amato)

I’ve said elsewhere, conspiracy theories seem to satisfy some of the same mental urges as religion. They are surprisingly like a mythos, in that they create exciting stories to explain the world about us. And just as religion, they provide the ultimate all-purpose explanation: Things difficult to explain can be seen instead as the manifestation of a powerful but invisible will. I’ll go out on a limb here and say that the idea of unseen will may actually be innate to the the human species, a built-in default hypothesis for about anything.

The thing making them different from religion though – or at least, traditional religion – is that the actors are not gods or spirits, but human. Still, perhaps conspiracy theories should be considered new materialist religions, belief systems for generations that, while still credulous, draw the line at the supernatural. (We’ll leave aside for now conspiracies that involve the influence of alien civilisations. These are supernatural beings in every sense that angels and demons are, just dressed from a contemporary costume box.)

But though the conspirators are not explicitly supernatural beings, they still have superhuman powers. They consistently pull off the scale of operation that non-clandestine organisations and governments usually seem to screw up. They have secrets that are never left in taxis or revealed by Wikileaks. They have superhuman powers of planning, efficiency, and organisation. Modern-day superpowers.

Hmm. They just don’t make gods like they used to.

We Are Not Alone:
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Cosmography Politics

September 11 – The First Ten Years

wtc
View onto a lost world

Ten years ago I spent this day with an online community, riveted to the events of September 11 even as some of our members were living through them in New York. Many moving things were said. Many terrible too – naturally we had one or two who wanted vengeance equal in horror to the attack. One actually did use the term “carpet bomb them into the stone age”.

But that was overwhelmed by the nobility of what most had to say, even as their country was being attacked. And not just the things they said, but what they did. Phones were out in New York, and some were frustrated to the point of tears that they couldn’t let their families know they were all right. Then someone had an idea – the rest of us could make the calls for them. The community proved itself that day.

I hope they do not mind if, ten years on, I repeat some of their words here.

I’m sitting watching the sky get dark from the smoke of the third building collapsing, and seeing a layer of soot settling on the cars and sidewalks. Soot that might be skin and bone and hair and burnt fragments of family pictures.
I haven’t got to the anger and revenge part of the process yet. I’m thinking of the mommy and daddy who are right now dying under 110 stories of rubble, while their kids are waiting in some school cafeteria to be picked up.
And I’m buoyed by the simple acts of grace and humanity shown by most of the folks on this board, offering to make phone calls and expressing true concern.
Sleep and food don’t seem to be very necessary things. But solidarity and human-ness sure are.
Defending a home is as close to pure animal instinct as most civilized humans get, and that’s as it should be, I imagine.
But in the defense of principles, on the contrary, we must behave as principled people, we must act as rationally and intelligently as we have the capacity to muster.
I’ve spent the day in a lot of quiet thought and meditation, and in watching to be sure my friends and loved ones were safe. I don’t really have much to say about this, except that I hope that we do not inflame a larger conflict in our quest to bring the perpetrators to justice. That would be a far greater tragedy than a single bombing, however horrible.

Wise words, and prophetic.

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Cosmography Politics Technology

The Persecution Of Google’s Eric Schmidt

There is now a follow-up to this article: The Return Of The Google Stalker

Schmidt, left, with Brin and Page
It is possible that they hired him to *look* evil though (Schmidt, left, with Brin and Page)

I’ve had unkind things to say in the past about Google, in particular executive chairman Eric E. Schmidt. Along with many others, I have – possibly unfairly – suggested that his attitude towards privacy rights might not be all it should.

I have never accused him of murder though. You have to give me that.

Eric Schmidt is being cyberstalked. No, that would be to aggrandize it. Someone is comment-spamming Eric Schmidt. Virtually anywhere Schmidt is mentioned, a Chinese guy calling himself Peter Cao comes to accuse him (and Stanford Professor of Artificial Intelligence Sebastian Thrun) of being involved in the murder and/or cover-up of the murder of May Mengyao Zhou, a Stanford graduate student whose suspicious death was ruled suicide. His accusations however lack… credibility. To say the least. Taken from the above links:

Eric Schmidt represents and is backed up by some mafia like dark force which tend to resovle their problems with killing power. Threatening my life with May Zhou’s case is not the only time, Schmidt’s side had actually plotted a murder on me during his fight with authorities and would have wiped me out, though it was crashed by securities in time, and that’s why he was removed from his CEO position. [Red text in the original]

Cao never seems to rest. Do a search on the terms “Peter Cao” “Eric Schmidt” and there are countless (highly repetitive) examples of his accusations. Is there any substance to them? Well, personally, I am strongly persuaded that the guy is an utter fruitbat. Here’s a glimpse of how he sees himself (which perhaps also reveals his motivation):

Google’s ambition in China is not limited in business. Google tried to act as a flagship of foreign powers to rival Chinese authorities on Chinese territory. Even till today, google still arrogantly places itself hight and lofty above Chinese people over its existence in China.
In the past, Google’s former CEO Eric Schmidt had backed up crimes against me, and had threatened my life with the mysterious death of very innocent people in Stanford in that case. I defeated Schmidt at authorities in this case and got him down from his CEO position. I could tell Google would be eventually terminated and kicked out of in China if Google executives refuse to ‘change stance on China’.

To make a bad situation worse, it appears someone responded to his comments on Business Insider by registering under the name Eric Schmidt and trolling the crazy guy (See comments):

Peter. It’s me, Eric. I thought we already talked about this. I am going to squash you like a bug if you keep posting on this comment board. What you don’t know (but surely suspected) is that the video cameras I installed in your house are allowing me to track everything you do. In fact, I am live streaming your pathetic life, including all the insane searches you do about my home address and love interests, to all my friends on the Stanford faculty. Next I will bring in my mafia-like dark killing power to bear.

I think most of us would assume that was not the real Schmidt… On what appears to be his blog however, Cao has taken the threat as vindication.

I report all this not because I think it’s amusing (though shamefully, I do), but out of a rather morbid fascination. Paranoid delusion is in the air right now as the tenth anniversary of 9/11 approaches. Fantasies of persecution – whether those of the deniers, or those of the attackers themselves – have the power to change the world. And recently it feels a lot like the mad are winning.

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Cosmography

Fox Vignette

Driving back through a storm, from dinner at a friends’ just a couple of villages away. Or an hour and a half’s drive, if you think you passed the house on your way there, drive almost all the way back home again, and be still so absolutely certain that you must have missed it twice that you do it all over again before finally consulting the GPS that has been running right in front of you all the time and realise that you are on the wrong road.

But that was the way there. Now it’s dark, and there are raindrops coming at the windscreen almost horizontally. You remember that “hyperspace jump” effect in Star Wars where the stars stretched out into lines? Looked just like that. I was driving into the storm, and the storm was driving into me.

Suddenly an animal dashed across the road in front of the car. A fox! A big one too. So hungry that it’s out hunting in torrential rain. And I in a nice waterproof tin box, heading home to a warm bed after a fabulous meal.

It’s great to be a human.

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Cosmography Politics

The War Against Humour

Ali Ferzat replies to his critics

I was going to call this a worrying trend. But no, it’s not. When I think about it it’s an exciting trend, a real sign of hope.

Governments throughout the Middle East are starting to take jokes seriously.

Pakistan has banned telling anti-government jokes by text or e-mail. On the streets of Syria, noted political cartoonist Ali Ferzat was attacked by pro-government thugs and beaten up, with particular attention paid to his hands.

What does it mean? Well, it shows that Ralph Steadman wasn’t entirely right. One of Britain’s most famous cartoonists of the 1960s, Steadman gave up political caricature because he came to think that politicians were so monstrous in their craving for attention that they saw satire as a form of flattery. Perhaps they only pretended not to be hurt, but they did a good job of it, offering to buy even the cruellest drawing. No wonder he despaired.

But while that may happen where leaders rule by popularity, they take a very different attitude when they control by fear. Nothing undermines fear more than ridicule – that’s why some of the best jokes come out of the most horrific situations. Laughter restores perspective, shrinks giants, drives out darkness. And laughter will win.

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Cosmography

A Brilliant Satire Of Market-Driven Idiocy

Julian Gough. Photograph: Anne Marie Fives

Good news: My friend Julian has a new novel out, Jude in London. Here’s the first review, from the Guardian.

Gooder news: You can read it for free. If you like it, you can pay what you think it’s worth afterwards.

Julian and his publisher needed to get copies out ahead of its scheduled publication date of September 6 for the book to qualify for the Guardian’s “Not The Booker” alternative literary prize, so they sent out PDFs on the honour system. The response was so good that they decided to extend the offer, at least until it comes out officially. This “books on trust” idea could revolutionise the publishing industry more than the eBook and iPad combined. Probably not of course, but it could.

If you need to read a bit of a novel before you decide if it’s even worth downloading for free, I can recommend the excerpt The Great Hargeisa Goat Bubble, which was published by the Financial Times as a short story and later converted into a radio play by BBC4 (Listen here). It’s brilliant satire of the market-driven idiocy that got us where we are today – most of it written long before the crash actually happened.

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Cosmography

Mathematical Cabbage

Math - It's what's for dinner
Math – It’s what’s for dinner

It’s not every day you taste a new vegetable. Especially not one that defies the laws of space and mathematics. But yesterday I found just that at our local organic farm, Green Earth.

They have some exotic stuff there from time to time, even new potatoes that taste like – and I know this is hard to believe – new potatoes, but I was taken aback to see that they had fractal florets, chaotic kale, or to give it a name people actually call it, romanesco broccoli.

Fractals are a phenomenon of nature of course, and you come across them in things from fern fronds to snail shells. But you rarely see them so clearly in three dimensions. Or I should say, more than three. Imagine a wiggly line drawn on paper. It’s an idealised line, so it has only one dimension – length without width. Now we zoom in. Normally when you do that, the section of line you focus on will look straighter than the whole wiggle because you’ll see fewer twists and turns, or even none. But our line is strange. We find that when magnified it still looks every bit as wiggly as it did on the larger scale. It has wiggles within wiggles, smaller-scale twists and turns in between the big ones. This is called self-similarity, and it too is a natural phenomenon. A coastline is still wiggly whether you see it from space or look at where the water meets the sand through a magnifying glass.

If the line is more wiggly than it looked from a distance, that means that it’s also longer than it looked. So if you could somehow keep looking closer and closer forever, you’d find it was always longer. Isn’t that a bit weird? It’s just a line on a finite, two-dimensional sheet of paper, yet somehow it’s infinitely long. That leads to the idea that shapes like this wiggly line, similar on all scales, must somehow be more than one-dimensional – though still less than two. It’s one-and-a-bit-dimensional. Fractionally dimensional. Fractal.

Just as there are wiggly lines that are a bit more than one-dimensional, there are flat patterns that exist in more than two. And there are solid objects – like the romanesco in my hands – that occupy more than three. Of course it doesn’t really extend into some invisible extra space.  The fraction of a dimension is just a clever way of quantifying the self-similarity. Yet looking at it, I feel like I’m wearing 4D classes¹. The symmetrical complexity is fascinating and beautiful. Its spires are made up of spirals made up of spires, spiralling into spire upon spiral spire. Whorls within whorls. Amen.

And gently steamed for about fifteen minutes, mathematics is delicious. Especially organic mathematics.

  1. One red lens, one blue lens, one green lens.

An easy intro to fractals.

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Cosmography Humour

Tip Of The Week

Ochlerotatus notoscriptus, Tasmania, Australia
You Little Bastard

An insect bit me last night. You should have seen it, it was about four feet long. OK, four inches long. Well half an inch. But those are the worst. Just a little biting fly, but I actually felt it. I assume this means that by fly standards it had huge fangs. The reaction seems to bear that out: A swelling the size of an egg.

F*** I hope it’s not an egg.

I’m always reluctant to take antihistamines. I know the immune system is a learning entity, almost an animal in itself, and I worry – perhaps unreasonably – that drugs may interfere with learning. What if they’re like its cigarettes, calming it down for now only to leave it more irritable after? Nevertheless I took one (Piriton). I knew this bite was going to be a bad’un.

I also managed to dig out the insect bite cream (Anthisan; I know this is beginning to sound like product placement, but I want to be precise about what did – and didn’t – work), which seems to have been finding new pockets of my bag to hide in ever since the walk in Clare. Then I flooded the house with fly spray (Raid…). That little bastard was not going to get me while I was sleeping, I didn’t want to wake up looking like bubble wrap.

Due perhaps to side effects of the first-generation antihistamine I slept soundly, waking at one in the afternoon in a state of mild panic. As a way to stimulate myself into action I’d set a very unfinished version of the last blog post to be published automatically at 1:30. (If you look at the URL you can see the article was originally titled “I’m Asleep”.) So if it sounds like it was written in a rush, you know why.

Written in a rush, by a man suffering intense irritation all down one arm. While I was asleep the itching had kicked into insane-making gear. Though the swelling was only in the slashy part of the wrist – annoyingly in the way, should I feel like ending it all – the itching spread upwards to my elbow, sideways around until it met itself at the back, and outwards for several inches. You know that feeling? It was like the air around my forearm was itchy.

I had to visit the pharmacy later anyway, so I asked for some ideas. The only thing they had that I hadn’t tried though was Eurax, the anti-itch cream. This proved… absolutely ineffective. Nothing was working, and I was now in no-scratch hell. There was only one thing to do. Something I should have tried a lot sooner.

I think I learned this years ago, when I had an attack of orf. Orf is a virus you can only get from a sheep bite. It’s a long story. Even if I leave out the acid trip, it’s still a long story.

A sink full of water as hot as I could bear it. Immersed entire forearm, kept it there a while. Then ran cold water over the effected area. I did that just once. It’s been a couple of hours. The itching hasn’t returned. I recommend this method.

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Cosmography Politics

The Lusitania Mystery

A warning issued by the Imperial German Embass...
Don't say we didn't warn you

The Lusitania – remembered throughout the Western World as “you know, that other ship that sank”, but actually a disaster of virtually the same scale as the Titanic. And perhaps, far greater consequence.

Far greater, because its sinking in 1915 just off the Irish coast arguably brought the United States into the First World War, turning its tide and changing the course of history. Arguably, because if you say this historians will argue with you. And this is not the only aspect of the disaster that remains controversial. Hit by a single German torpedo, the ship was shocked by not one but two explosions. Was it secretly carrying munitions to Britain? If so, then sinking it wasn’t the mindless act of German aggression against civilians that the British made out in their propaganda, but a legitimate act of war. Right?

This rumour was exacerbated by the apparent fact that the British dropped depth charges on the wreck in the 1950s – presumably to destroy the evidence that the Germans were perfectly justified in sinking it. Because the Americans would be so pissed if they found out that they were tricked into joining a war they won by… by secretly smuggling weapons to the British unbeknownst to themselves.

Unfortunately for the theory it had been known since precisely all along that the Lusitania was carrying weapons. They’re in the cargo manifest. It’s just that it was rifle ammunition and the non-explosive parts of shell fuses, which wouldn’t explain the second explosion. There must therefore have been some other sort of weapon that they were keeping secret, but which would have justified the Germans sinking the ship if they did know about it – which they didn’t because otherwise they would have mentioned by now I think – if they needed any more justification, which they didn’t.

What I’m broadly saying here is that this is not a very good theory.

Besides, the Germans were trying to blockade Britain for Christ sake, they were going to make an exception for luxury liners? Just wave them on through? “Don’t mind us, we’re having a war.” They had even warned potential passengers that they considered the liners targets [See Illustration]. The Cunard shipping line just took a gamble, and it didn’t pay off. Not even a little.

It seems likely that the second explosion was merely the ship’s high-pressure steam turbine system rupturing. In all probability the US would have joined the war eventually. Even if they hadn’t the French and British should have won anyway, having access through their vast maritime empires to far greater resources than Germany and Austria-Hungary. So the sinking of the Lusitania is probably the greatest non-mystery in the history of disaster at sea. And it may soon be solved!

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Cosmography

Walking On The Moon

A better picture of karst than I got today, by ladydog22

It was my birthday today, and I thought I’d spend it doing something positive and renewing. So, a walk in my favourite landscape: The Burren.

This is one area of Ireland that is made of stone instead of grass. It’s karst, also called limestone pavement (but why would you, when you could say “karst”?), a terrain where soluble stone has been washed away leaving great slabs and gaps. Or clints and grykes, to give them their rude-sounding technical names. It’s weirdly lunar.

Burren Sky
Burren Sky

We walked up Turlough Hill. It’s not a big mountain, but it’s beautifully layered, almost an Aztec pyramid. This is the kind of hill walking I like, because rather than a constant, merciless slope it consists of short but tough hands-on climbs interspersed with almost level ‘rests’. Nevertheless I struggled, the girlfriend bounding contemptuously ahead. I’m still way out of shape, despite the exemplary life I lead these days. But hey, I never expected I’d even live this long, so I’m way ahead on that score.

Burren Sea
Burren Sea

It was on the way down that I shone. It really felt like all that potential energy I’d stored going uphill was coming out. Or maybe the Burren just renews me. It was basically a matter of jumping from rock to rock, and I love that stuff.

If there was one drawback, it wasn’t a great day for photography. I did get better shots though later in the afternoon when we drove to Doolin, where karst meets sea.