On Geert Wilders and the Complex Issue of Immigrants in Europe

At electoral-vote.com March 15th is a short item about European elections.  It reads and Dutch presidential candidate Geert Wilders in particular:

Elections in The Netherlands, France, and Germany this year will test whether right-wing, anti-immigrant parties can upset the established order worldwide. The first test is today in the Netherlands, where 28 parties will be vying for seats in the 150-seat lower chamber of the parliament. Seats are allocated to parties in proportion to the popular vote, with no geographic restrictions. According to some polls, the leading parties are the VVD (Party for Freedom and Democracy) led by Prime Minister Mark Rutte and the PVV (Party for Freedom), led by anti-Islam zealot Geert Wilders.

Wilders is even more fanatically anti-Islam than Trump. His platform includes securing the borders, closing mosques, closing centers for refugees, banning the Koran, and forbidding women from wearing headscarves. He also wants the Netherlands to follow the U.K. out of the European Union.

He has some things in common in Trump besides his dislike of immigrants. In particular, he communicates with people by tweeting, in order to avoid the media filter. His hair is also somewhat unconventional. His economic policies are generally left wing, though, and so he will attract some votes on that basis alone. What is extremely unusual is that his official platform (in Dutch) fits on a single page and has only 11 items, as follows:

• De-Islamitize the Netherlands (with 8 bullets about specific items such a banning mosques and the Koran)

• Leave the European Union

• Introduce binding referendums on policy issues

• Eliminate all deductibles in health insurance

• Lower the rents on apartments

• Bring the age for Social Security back to 65 (it is creeping up to 67)

• No government financing for foreign aid, windmills, art, innovation, public radio or TV, etc.

• Eliminate previously imposed austerity measures in home care and care for the elderly

• Expand funding for defense and the police

• Lower income taxes

• Reduce the vehicle registration tax by half

I’ve sort of kept up with events in Holland and other northern European countries for some years, due to the seemingly very real problems that they’ve experienced with Muslim immigrants being sometimes aggressive in pushing religious dictates on some rather small countries.

Frankly, it appears that that has been a clash of cultures, one that came mostly from their membership in the European Union.  With the EU, anyone who can get into the EU is free to travel and work anywhere else in the EU.  So, people who get into, say, Greece, can then travel up to Holland and get a job and stay.

Maybe OJ Didn’t Do It, After All. . .

I am just finishing up watching the mini-series entitled “Is OJ Innocent? – The Missing Evidence“.

SPOILER ALERT!

Please don’t read this if you haven’t watched the mini-series and intend to watch it.  I am posting this here rather than on Primewire.me where I watched it – because they have a warning about not posting spoilers.

Okay, after all is said and done and the mystery witness had come forth, which tied a lot of things together, I think they didn’t quite nail it.

AGAIN: SPOILER ALERT! . . .

There is a realistic way to account for the discrepancy  between the 9:59 stopped watch and the 10:15 time of OJ and Jason arriving on the scene.  My scenario, is close to what William Dear came up with at about 30:00 into the video – but not quite – and for what it is worth, here it is:

Gun Control in the Post-Scalia Era

I didn’t see any mention of gun control today.

But I am sure it will occur to everyone pretty damned soon.

With the SCOTUS changing we can expect to see gun control cases going to the court that wouldn’t have before.

When Kennedy also retires, the balance goes 6-3 the other way.

The current Senate can only forestall so long.  Once November comes and the Blue Wall kicks in and the Senate goes Democratic, only the House stands between the GOP and Götterdämerung.

Obama won’t get gun control, but it’s coming.

 

Republicans and Authoritarians and Baptists, Oh My!

In this month that is the start of the American Presidential campaign 2016, after already so many debates, it is fitting and proper that we take a look at the clowns that the Republican Party has who somehow think that they are even REMOTELY qualified to be President of the United States.

I think I will start with this:

“By ‘right-wing authoritarianism’ I mean the covariation of three attitudinal clusters in a person:

1. Authoritarian submission – a high degree of submission to the authorities who are perceived to be established and legitimate in the society in which one lives.
2. Authoritarian aggression – a general aggressiveness, directed against various persons, that is perceived to be sanctioned by established authorities.
3. Conventionalism – a high degree of adherence to the social conventions that are perceived to be endorsed by society and its established authorities.”

That is from The Authoritarian Specter, by Bob Altemeyer, written in 1996 (Harvard University Press).

Be aware that he was writing not about a system, but about individual persons and what is going on in their heads.  I kind of like the term “attitudinal clusters”.  I might use that one myself in the future.

That book is for academics.  For those who do not want to wade through an academic treatise like me, feel free to read The Authoritarians, a more readable version of Altemeyer’s work, which was my introduction to his work.

When I look at Ted Cruz, the most blatant grabber for power among the silly party candidates, all I see is Joe McCarthy, a Joe McCarthy in religious garb.

On Stupidity, Capacity, and Religion

I am kind of participating in a Facebook discussion about stupid people.  In the discussion someone posted a YouTube with John Cleese and Bill Maher.  I completely agree with their points.  The idea that we should expect people to strive to be somewhat intelligent is a proper one, regardless what P.C. people may argue.

This gets kind of long.  Not much hope for that. It is actually a bigger subject than we normally might think, and this still only scratches the surface.  But I am not necessarily inviting discourse, just talking .  If I didn’t think that this level of mentality wasn’t threatening the world and the USA in particular, I wouldn’t even write on it.  But people pandering to the stupid people of the USA has picked up so much steam that at some point we have to look at stupidity long enough to sort out some things.

Who Is Building the World, Anyway ?

In order to talk about stupidity we need to actually understand a bit about how very intelligent people can and have set up the world in a fairly sane way.  This world didn’t just pop up like a kernel of popcorn, fully expanded and ready to go. Everywhere you look, there is intelligence displayed – in beautiful buildings, in well-engineered bridges, dams, road systems, well-planned city centers, and many, many more things – things that matter.  These things perhaps even define our civilization.  

Part of the world, however, isn’t exactly physical – it is mental.  Education underlies it all, that part, anyway, and IMHO all the rest, too.  Our political systems, as flawed as they may be at any point in time, are part of that legacy.  We have this American Experiment that is always going awry in some fashion or other.  We have some very wise and far-seeing people to credit for that.  Not a one of them was stupid.  But, for those who haven’t read up on it at all, it didn’t start with them.

The Scottish Enlightenment and Education

For those of us who’ve been taught that the American Founding Fathers thought of all that stuff on their own – which is most of us – I recommend they read a book called “How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe’s Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It” sometime.  It is about something most of us know nothing about – The Scottish Enlightenment.  The American Founding Fathers are the second or third generation of that kind of thinking. It amazed me that Jefferson and Franklin and all didn’t just spring out of nothing.  

ORTHODOX SCIENCE AND ALTERNATIVE RESEARCHERS – AN ESSAY

 

Alternative Researchers

The term is one commonly used by serious non-credentialed inquirers to distinguish themselves from academic historians and academic scientists, all of whom have achieved their status by way of acquiring a diploma from some institute of higher learning.  The term “alternative research,” does not indicate much to the average person on the street, but there is an increasing number of people who can distinguish that it means quite a lot.

To this audience the term indicates that the inquirer whose work they’re going to read or listen to at a conference is someone who is not bashful about stepping on toes, who calls a spade a spade, whose career does not depend on toeing some line and playing it safe.

To the “credentialed inquirer” (an academic) the term “aternative researcher” means someone who has few if any standards, has not accrued any standing, who has not learned how to think critically, and who is close to being a snake oil salesman.  OUCH!

One has only to look at the history of science to see that it is replete with many early researchers who would today be considered dabblers – mere “researchers”.  Some point to Einstein himself as a dabbler, since he was working in the Swiss Patent Office at the time he developed his Theory of Relativity.  But Einstein is not an appropriate example of a non-credentialed inquirer, because he had only taken the job as a stop-gap measure.  He had attended university and was already known a little bit in the academic world.

Benjamin Franklin would be a more appropriate example of a non-credentialed inquirer. He had little formal education and but had a fervent interest in multiple areas of inquiry and – eventually – a wide circle of influential people in science as an audience.  At that time, evidently, the wall between the two types of researchers had not yet formed.

“Alternative” implies “pseudo” to credentialed scientists, it seems, and certainly suggests outside of science.  It is difficult to address history or archaeology in this present essay, since both of them use so much interpretation that is not quantified, leading to two fields that are so rife with personal prejudice, subjectivity and belief system as to render them both little more than compendia of opinions.  A close friend who is degreed in history amazed me with assertions that everyone is allowed to have an opinion, and that no opinion is considered true above any others.  As an engineer, to hear that even FACTS are debatable and only opinion – well you can imagine my reaction…  I DO ask that friend if 2+2=4 is just an opinion.  So far no answer…

Another look at the Carolina bays

I did something interesting and would like to share it…

About a year ago Michael Davias shared with me his Excel spreadsheet pertaining to the Carolina bays.  And what a spreadsheet it is.  The amount of work Michael put into locating and quantifying their locations and sizes and alignments boggles my mind.  It was, as I understand it, tied in with his LIDAR work on the bays.  And without LIDAR, probably the majority of the bays simply are not find-able.  The two – LIDAR and the data – go hand in hand, but the numbers of bays is really up there, and to think that he was able to extract so much precise data about the bays is just mind-numbing.  My hat goes off to Michael for doing so much foundational work.

THE CAROLINA BAYS, BY THE NUMBERS

A few of the more than 43,900 Carolina bays.  [Click to enlarge.]

Maybe the first question that comes to your mind is how many of them Davias was able to find.  The answer to that is 43,900 bays. [Author’s note: I have since been apprised that the number is pushing 45,000 now; the work goes on… I will continue to use the 43,900 number in this post, however… Laziness…LOL]

So the world now has a fairly precise count of the Carolina bays.  It is not half a million, as some have speculated.  It is 43,900.  But 43,900 is still a LOT of bays.  It is also a very large database from which to derive statistical meaning.

How many types of bay planforms are there?  Five types exist in the eastern USA.  Michael gave the three types the names BayCarolina, BayBell, and BaySouth, bayShore, and bayOval.  A sixth type regardless of shape is called BayWest, strictly on location – out in the Great Plains.

What is the size range?  The largest one is 7.95 km x 6.19 km.  The smallest is 0.03 km x 0.03 km.

The farthest north bay is at latitude 41.76°N; the farthest south is at 30.79°N. The farthest east is at 72.80°W; the farthest west is at 100.80°W (in the Bay West group.  Of those in the eastern USA, the farthest west is at 87.62°W.

A Change of Pace – 3D Body Parts

Move over Captain Kirk!  Or take a bow, Gene Roddenberry!  Your Replicators are developing almost as fast as they are printing out “stuff.”

FIRST STUFF?  NEW AORTAS, FROM YOUR OWN CELLS

You knew this was coming:  3d printed body parts.  Main blood vessels would seem to be made to order for 3D printers.  They don’t have permeable walls – all they are is tubes to move the blood from one part of the body to another.  As long as the material is not rejected by the body and does not break down, it would seem that aortas would be a perfect application of 3D printing.  And if they can make it out of our own cells, the rejection problem should be completely eliminated – and breakdown should pretty much gone, as well: The 3D printed one should last as long as the original, perhaps the rest of our lives.

Will they be able to make new livers and kidneys and pancreases, complex organic factories?  Certainly not at this stage, but given time, it seems possible, if not altogether doable.

THE PIECES START TO COME TOGETHER – Circa late 1990s

About 15 years ago or so, I first heard of 3D printers, and the first thought in my mind was Star Trek transporters.  Don’t laugh!  We are well on our way!

To transport, the Star Trek idea was to disassemble an object or organism by full body scanning and disassembling the body molecule by molecule, and then transmitting the pattern to another location and re-assembling it.  It was similar to replicating, but had the extra steps at the transmitting end of identifying every molecule in the body and, one-by-one, removing them from the object or organism.  From that point on, the two are pretty identical. (Except for how to deal with the consciousness/personality/memories.)

But ten years ago, where was the scanner?

Aha! THAT, dear reader, had been invented LONG before – around 1980-ish – with NMR, nuclear magnetic resonance.  NMR is now usually called MRIs. MRIs display IN 3D and only display (usually).

Enter CNCs for a moment, just for illustrative purposes:

Computer Numerically Controlled machining centers are the current way that metal parts are made these days. A CNC takes a computer generated “model” of a part – that is EXACTLY the same size and shape as the finished part needs to be.  That model LOOKS like the real 3-dimensional part – with holes and notches and chamfers and shoulders and hubs and bosses and all sorts of shapes.  There was a transition period for CNC machines, when a person would have to take a 2-dimenional drawing and, using proper commands, create the 3D model for the machinist.  But at this point in tech history the 2D drawing is done away with.  The designer now creates the object’s shape in 3D exactly as he wants it.  That is the “model” – the cyber-equivalent to the real thing.  There is no extra step anymore – software now directly takes that cyber model and from it generates all the steps needed by the machining center (the CNC).  And the parts come out super accurate.

THAT tech has been with us now for a long time.  CNC tech, like all machining, is basically a SUBTRACTIVE process – you start with a chunk of metal slightly too big, and then you start removing metal until the shape is 100% correct. 100% of the unneeded material is taken away, leaving only what you want, in the shape you want.  What is NEW is that the 3D printer is not subtractive but is instead ADDITIVE.  And THAT is pretty cool.  You start with nothing, and then keep adding the material layer by layer until you’ve got the finished part.

And that is EXACTLY what a replicator or a transporter needs to do at the “building” end – keep putting more material in until the thing is 100% built – 100% of the needed material has been ADDED.

It is, I found, very apropos to call it “printing,” by the way.  Watching a 3D printer is like watching now-obsolete large format ink printers for technical drawings.  But it is also like watching the really old teletype type printers from the 1950s.  And it right now is just about that slow, at least for some of the current printers.  It is also a bit like watching fax machines print out.  But as teletypes and faxes got faster and faster, and as new innards are developed, the 3D printers of 10 years from now will probably be 10 times faster.  Perhaps 100 or 1,000 times faster.

PATTERNS AND MODELS

The Star Trek shows usually used the term “Pattern Buffer.”  Basically, and perhaps literally, that is the same thing as saying a “3D computer model.”  Once the model is created, it is stored in a computer file, and many copies of the object can be made from that one cyber model.  Making copies does not degrade the file in any way – it is just a template.  Template, model, pattern buffer – same thing.

So now, we have had the two main rudimentary elements of Star Trek transporters around for over 10 years.  The early “builder” elements, however were only capable of dealing with one material at a time – the early 3D printers. (It was called stereolithography then.)   I could see that at the time, and that that would change.  I figured that in time people would ask if a second and third material could be added.  After all, how many different elements are in a human body?  How many different molecule types?  I guessed that someone was already thinking about those other materials and how to incorporate them into the 3D printers.

It turns out that I was right to expect that.  I see these articles now, and I smile. We are on our way, Captain Kirk!

As far as body parts go, we may be able to – SHOULD be able to – repair many or most or maybe someday ALL of our organs this way. We may be able to pre-print them and keep them in cry-stasis, waiting for the day when we need them.  Just thinking about what all this might do for human longevity makes my head spin.  We may be close to 200-year-old people – perhaps 1,000 year old people.

We may not be able to transport ourselves, though.  Doing that will mean transferring the consciousness to the new body location.  Can we do that? That will have to be proven before I will believe it.  But it MIGHT HAPPEN!  I honestly do not know. But at the same time, just replacing body PARTS is something FAR beyond what Mary Shelley could have envisioned in “Frankenstein.”  Is it better to re-animate dead tissue or to keep the tissue alive in the first place?

What do you think?

More on that Clovis-Mammoth Discussion

In my previous post, Mapping Clovis Man vs Mammoths – Just Asking, I’d asked about the apparent blind spot in Clovis-Mammoth studies.  The maps there showed Clovis artifacts VERY predominantly in the Eastern USA, yet amazingly, the only “Clovis sites” chosen for study in Waguespack & Surovell 2003 were sites specifically showing mammoth kills.

Later, in Surovell & Waguespack 2007, the authors say

Using the most lenient and problematic standard of Proboscidean use, simple presence in zooarcheological assemblages, we previously estimated that at least 91 individual mammoths and mastodons are known from a total of 26 Clovis sites (Waguespack and Surovell, 2003, Table 2). Based on available data, no other taxon is present in as many sites or is represented by as many individuals.

My initial problem here has to be their amazing definition of a “Clovis site.” Here, is a different map of artifacts in the USA:

 

(from http://www.viewzone.com/solutrean.html)

Now, when we read about the Leakeys finding pre-human artifacts in the Olduvai Gorge, the places they are found are normally called “sites” or “digs”. Now maybe Surovell defines sites as some activity, not just a Clovis point.  I would heartily disagree.  But let’s not quibble too much, because we don’t have to.  Look at the map of Clovis artifacts here.  Let’s also assume that the website’s authors weren’t stupid enough to just make that map up out of their imaginations.  If we go with Surovell’s idea of a “site”, then a stray Clovis point may have been dropped somewhere along a trail, not at a campsite.  Still, in a world where all travel is on foot, that dropped point is not going to be more than 20 miles from whatever campsites might be used.  By point population alone, it is clear from the map that the careless Clovis hunters were hunting in the regions shown – in both the East and the West.

Mapping Clovis Man vs Mammoths – Just Asking

I’ve been reading a paper, Wagespack and Surovell 2003, as a starting point to see what Surovell’s other papers are about.  His paper attempting to shoot down the Younger Dryas Impact hypothesis was pretty bad science, since he was incapable of following test protocols, so when I got a line on some of his other papers, I decided to see what kind of work he normally does.

In this paper I am seeing that he makes an awful lot of assumptions, ones he thinks are reasonable.  But his selection of data is dumbfounding.  He seems to just make shit up, too, such as a table on what the average density of mammals large and small over the whole of the USA.  With the vast array of ecosystems slash environments in the USA, it is unfathomable that anyone would make up ONE table and give ONE average density and think it could or would apply to the entire country.  One of the oddest things about it is that it includes both Asian elephants and African elephants – but does NOT include mammoths – the subject of his paper.

To cut to the chase, let’s show some maps…

I LOVE this map! Except for a few regions (which may be a long term sampling problem) you might match this up quite well with maps of population density in North America in modern times. Does this mean, I wonder, if Paleo-Indians were as bright as we are in terms of livable land? Also, note the quite dense artifact density in the Southeastern and Appalachian regions.  (source: http://pidba.org/content/PIDBA%20Figure%2001.jpg)

Note here, in particular, the lack of mammoths and mastodons in the SE USA and Tennessee valley and southern Mississippi valley. Basically next to no mastodons and mammoths. (source: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-es4V_24PSA8/UEknF8fpF5I/AAAAAAAAErY/som51D_p0V0/s1600/Mammoths-North-America-map.jpg)

And here, Surovell’s/Waguespack’s map, discussing the hunting preferences of Clovis Man, which purportedly is discussing how Clovis Man might have hunted other game than mammoths and mastodons. Note that ewre the most PEOPLE (artifacts) are found, Surovell and Waguespack don’t show ANY sites studied. They ONLY show them in the regions where mammoth bones and mastodon bones have been found.