enkiduonthenet

Evolution

If we accept Darwin’s theory of evolution, which I do, then we accept that we are the way we are as a result of a very period of gradual changes brought about by the pressures that our species has experienced through emergence and during process of its existence.

But let’s take a step back. All organisms have so called genetic material, stuff within them which encodes the way they are and the way that their offspring will be. The genetic material is copied as a part of the process of living, of growing and of repairing the organism if it sustains damage.



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If that were all there was to the process, then organisms would be static, with no changes and no evolution. In fact the process is not perfect and both minor and major changes to the genetic material happen all the time, by all sorts of means.

Obviously, if too many changes or major changes occur in the genetic material, then the organism may not grow properly and may not repair itself properly when damaged. Also if the genetic material is passed to the organism’s descendants, they may they may not be viable or they may be disadvantaged and be unable to thrive and reproduce.

To counter this, our bodies have mechanisms to repair our genetic material, our DNA. If our bodies did not have this ability, it is unlikely that we would last long, as our body cells could experience millions of cases of damage to our genetic material per cell per day. That’s an awful lot of damage!

As described in the Wikipedia reference above, the errors in our genetic material could result in cell death or unregulated growth resulting in tumours. The DNA repair mechanism in our cells do a good job, but they are only effective if the DNA strands are broken or incomplete. If a change is minor, and is properly reflected on both strands of our double helices, then the repair system will not notice the change.

This allows small changes to slip through, and provided they don’t cause life threatening problems, they may get passed to our descendants. The same applies to organisms other than ourselves of course.

Some major changes do slip through and organisms may end up with extra chromosomes or with damaged chromosomes. Sometimes these issues may not cause too many problems for the organism, while in other cases the descendant organism may not survive long enough to breed.

The minor errors mentioned above may affect the descendant organism to some extent, making it more or less successful than its parent organisms. The theory of evolution suggests that if the change in the genetic material makes it more successful than its siblings who don’t have the small errors, then, over generations, organisms carrying the new DNA changes will eventually replace those who don’t carry the change.

This could lead to problems for an organism. If we consider a stable population with few pressures, that has plenty of resources, there is little that would cause any permanent changes to the population, and small genetic traits could appear and disappear over time and not have any measurable effect.

If the environment then changes, such that one trait provides a large benefit to those individuals who have this trait, then over time there will be a tendency for the trait to be found in more individuals and the number of individuals without it would fall.

If the environment changes back again, then those with the trait may be disadvantaged and those without the trait could then come to dominate the population. However if enough time had passed and all the individuals without the trait in their genetic material had died out, then the population would be stuck with the trait.

It would be extremely unlikely but not impossible for the change in the genetic material to be reversed by chance as this would require another minor error to exactly reverse the original error. In effect, evolution as reflected in the genetic material never (or astronomically rarely) reverses.

If a group of organisms gets isolated from the rest of its species, some of the genes that are present in the population at large will not be present. In addition, some of the genes in the isolated population will also die out, either by chance, or because the trait that they confer is not beneficial in the isolated environment.



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This can cause problems for the population if the environment changes dramatically to the detriment of the organisms. While the population at large may have genes which would enable the population to survive the changes, but those genes may have died out in the isolated environment, and the population may fail.

Of course, a mutation may arise which would enable organisms to survive in the new conditions, but environmental changes would almost certainly be faster than the rate of evolution through mutation.

exemples de mutations possibles sur l'ADN — exemples de mutations possibles sur l’ADN (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Some species have different behaviours and appearance while still remaining the same species. Some of Darwin’s finches are an example. At least two varieties of one of the species feed on the Opuntia cactus, but they have different ways of feeding on them. One variety has a long beak and can punch holes in the cacti, while the other variety, with a short beak, break open the cacti to feed.

The birds can and do interbreed, so they are indeed the same species. This is similar, I presume, to the variation in skin colour in humans or the various blood types in humans. Such species have the same genes, but have slightly different versions (alleles) of it. This is called genetic polymorphism.

A species, like the finches, has to adapt. If its environment changes and it is unable to respond, then it will die out as innumerable species have done and are still doing. However, a species needs time to respond to environmental changes. For instance, polar bears may die out because the sea is is not freezing over as it usually does, and as a result there are no seals for the bears to hunt.

Whether or not you attribute the warming to mankind’s actions or not, the lack of freezing is a fact, and the bears are so far unable to adapt to the new conditions, and are often becoming a nuisance to arctic communities.



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How to change the world

Why do people think that petitions and protests can change the world? Well, they can but only if many, many other factors also fall in line. I’m thinking here of the protests about Post Offices or Bank Branches that are shut down when the demand for the services falls away.

If demand is falling, then the branches will not be financial profitable, and the bank or Post Office will be very unlikely to keep them open. Banks and the Post Office and not charitable institutions and have to make a profit for their shareholders, and they would not be able to do that if the branches are unprofitable.

In the same way cash strapped public services (such as the Police) are also being forced to close public offices. While the Police closures mentioned in the linked article cite the danger to the volunteers who man the offices, and the closures are supposed to be temporary, many people believe that the real reason is costs. In fact the Police management claim that using modern technology police of the street can be more mobile and do not need to use the offices so frequently.

Whatever the true reasons, protest and petitions are unlikely to have any effect. If changes are for operational or financial reasons, then unless the reasons change, the changes are very unlikely to be reversed. Any opposition is going to be ineffective.

Sometimes a protest or petition can be effective, but that requires that a lot of things go the the way of the protesters. In this country the Mixed Member Proportional election system was selected in 1996 to be the method of electing Parliament.

There were two main factors that enabled the selection of MMP as the election system. Firstly, there was a feeling that a change needed to occur, as many people thought that with the then existing system a vote for a losing candidate was a wasted vote, and that minor parties were unable to make an impression on Parliament – frequently a minor party would get 10 to 15% of the vote, but would get maybe only one or two seats out of 100.

English: Election signs for the major parties ... — English: Election signs for the major parties plus a sign supporting the MMP side in the referendum in the constituency of Ottawa South. Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty is the Liberal candidate there. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In the two previous elections, one party, Labour, had secured more than 50% of the vote, but had lost out to National, because they had won more seats. Naturally the Labour voters were incensed by this seeming injustice.

The second big factor was a small and vociferous group of people who felt that it was necessary to change and the system and who were able to use their political connections to influence media and political commentators to promote their favoured system, MMP. It also helped that they had no effective opposition, as the opposition was politically naive and unorganised.

Dubious tactics were alleged (and probably were used, on both sides), and well before it came to a vote in a referendum on the subject, it was almost a foregone conclusion. Actually the result was closer than many people predicted, though in retrospect that was probably just due to political inertia, and many people voted for the status quo of the time, rather than the new and untested alternative.

There were no real financial or operational reasons for not changing the voting system. If, say, it made it a lot more expensive to run an election, then the voting system would not have been changed, and if it made it a lot more complicated to vote (as did one of the competing systems, STV), then it would not have been changed.



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Similarly, if the proponents of the new system had been disorganised, disunited, or politically naive, then they would not have stood a chance. They would have failed at the first hurdle, which was getting a Royal Commission to look into the options set up.

As an example of how it can go wrong, fairly recently a referendum was held to decide if we were going to keep our existing flag or get a new one. There was no groundswell of dissatisfaction with the existing flag, except for the niggle that it kept getting mistaken for the Australia flag and vice versa.

There was no politically inspired organisation to push for a new flag and there was no obvious contender for a new flag. Therefore, there was no momentum going into the referendum for a change in the flag. So the referendum came down to firstly choosing between some mediocre choices for a replacement and then a fight off between the existing flag and the alternative.

An interesting point is that the “winning” alternative was not the one that got the most votes at the first count. As the selection was done on the STV system, as flags were removed from the list and the votes were reassigned, the second highest polling flag in the first round gained enough votes to overtake the highest polling flag.



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This demonstrates a deficiency of the STV system, though its supporters would claim that it was an advantage! In any case the alternative flag lost out to the existing flag by a fairly wide margin.

As an example of how to change the world, this debate and referendum was a dud. There was just not enough political nous on the side of those who would change the flag for it to become a reality. In addition, while the change was sponsored by the Prime Minister, it was not adopted by his party in a comprehensive way. It gave the impression that it was a pet project of the Prime Minister, and was not fully endorsed by his party.

So that is brief and by no means exhaustive look at how to change the world. It starts with a small number of dedicated and driven people and builds from there. It doesn’t matter if the ideas are actually good or bad, because if you can get the ball rolling, people will fight to sign up for the cause.

If you can’t build the support, well, then your aims and ideals will go nowhere. That’s why little protests about Post Offices and Bank Branches will never win. They can’t build the momentum.

‘Pushed to breaking point’: Post Office workers on today’s strike

Trivia



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Most people know that bees make cells which are hexagonal to store their honey. As it says in the article, this is the most economical structure in terms of the amount of wax that is needed to construct it, as the linked article describes.

Some people go into raptures about how clever the bees are and assume that they have some instinct which guides them in constructing these almost perfect hexagons. In fact the cells start out round and the bees warm them to make the wax mobile and liquid tension does the rest.



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The same process occurs in bubbles in a bath. If the bubbles are all roughly the same size, they also form a hexagonal array. This sort of diminishes the mystery of the beehive and the seeming ability of the bees to do geometry, but it seems obvious in retrospect. Bees don’t know geometry but they do know (in some sense) the properties of beeswax.

The above is a prime example of trivia. As defined at Dictionary.com trivia is merely inconsequential information. However, it can be more than that, as while the information is (in most situations) totally useless, many people find it interesting and a few find it fascinating.

For a very few people trivia can become lucrative and even a full-time occupation. The prevalence of quiz shows where people are rewarded according to their ability to recall inconsequential facts shows that the human race as a whole appears to have the ability to remember obscure facts which apparently have little to do with their needs as they navigate through their daily lives.

All humans remember items of trivia. Granny might be able to recall what her sister told her on her wedding day, or exactly what Grandpa said when he returned from the war, but these are probably of no relevance to her Grandchildren. Memory is fluid however, and Great Aunt Mary might have totally different memories of the occasion.

It may be that being able to remember trivia is one of the things that separates us from the rest of the apes. It would presumably be an evolutionary advantage to store great amounts of apparently irrelevant information because one never knows when apparently irrelevant information suddenly becomes relevant.

For instance, staring at the stars and noting their apparently irrelevant patterns suddenly becomes relevant when you notice that about the same time that that particular pattern rises in the sky that the whole river valley becomes flooded and it is time to temporarily move to the hills.



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Some people have minds that soak up inconsequential facts and others do not have that ability to the same extent. I know that my mind does so, and this has gained me invitations to join quiz teams and so on, and I’ve even managed to get onto a TV quiz show, though I didn’t do too well on it.

I’m constantly amazed at what trivia my mind has stored in it. When watching a quiz show on TV I quite often know the answer to obscure questions, and I’ve no idea how I picked it up. Sometimes it is something that I could perhaps only have heard once, in passing, and it for some reason stuck in my head.

Memory is fickle though. Many times I have been asked a question or a question has come up on a TV show and I am sure that I know the answer but I’ve been unable to recall it. When the answer is given there is a sense of “Of course!”.

As I mentioned above, memory can be totally false as well. Often an answer to a trivia question will pop into my head, and I’m certain that it is right, only for it to turn out to be wrong. I’m left with a sense of disappointment that my memory is incorrect.



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Some people, call them Quiz Masters, are able to store and remember trivial facts much better than the rest of us. These people star in quiz shows, win prizes and travel the world on the strength of their abilities. It’s not necessarily a sinecure, as they constantly have to top up their knowledge by reading, well, trivia.

On occasions a Quiz Master will mention that they have “just revised” a particular topic. Or that one of their peers has just recently told them something that just happened to occur in a question. A true Quiz Master apparently has to work pretty hard to keep on top of the facts that may occur in a quiz, to the extent of studying facts about something that they have no real interest in.

I mentioned above that I have no idea why the human race has this ability to store all this useless information. It’s evident that animals remember things, as you would not be able to train your dog if it didn’t remember things. However, it seems to me that other animals do not have this immense capacity to remember seemingly irrelevant information.

Maybe this is part of what leads to out ascendance on this planet. With our vast stores of information about things around us, we can use this information to survive where other animals can’t. Maybe it is this vast store of information, the ability to recall it all, and the ability to use or brains to process and use this information that allowed us to become ascendant.

Information-integration (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Maybe the Quiz Masters are the intellectual descendants of the proto-humans who worked out that when those stars rose in that place in the sky that the animals that were their prey would be migrating around that time, and it was a good time to visit the migration trails.

Whatever the reason that we have the ability to remember information that appears at the moment of remembering to be totally irrelevant, we can nevertheless enjoy that moment when the Quiz Master on the TV gets the trivia question wrong and we can triumphantly claim “I knew that!”, in spite of the fact that we didn’t know the answers to the preceding twenty or thirty questions.



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Milestones



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The previous post that I made was the 200th since I started writing this blog. I started in January 2013 and intended, at the time to make it about cooking and my successes and failures in that respect. However the cooking has pretty much disappeared (at least for now) and I’ve been writing about things like science, politics and philosophy. It’s strange how things turn out!

200 posts mean 200,000 words, more or less. However some of the early ones are shorter and so I’ve probably not quite reached the 200,000 word point yet. I aim to keep going at least until I hit 250 posts which implies a word count of 250,000 or so.

I, and most other bloggers I guess, blog about things that interest me. I don’t do it as a job, and I don’t seek out to address any particular set of people or demographic. I just hope that what I write is at least mildly interesting to those who stumble across it. I have around 100 “followers”, people who have subscribed to this blog, but I can’t tell how many of those skip over the emails that tell them that I have posted a new article.

Posting articles must fulfil some need that I have, but I don’t really know what it is. This is the first time that I’ve done something like this and not failed to keep it going. My random ramblings don’t spring out of a need to “reach out” to those out there. I don’t have a burning desire to see that my message is promulgated to all that will listen. I don’t even have a message.



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Nevertheless, blogs are a way of putting out there the things that interest me, like science, religion, and, basically, philosophy. It’s not a way of sorting out my thoughts and rubbing the rough edges off of my ideas. I don’t even think that my ideas are unique! When I do what little research I do while writing these articles, I often stumble across some article that addresses the same issues that I am writing about, probably in a more organised and coherent way.

I cite Wikipedia quite often, not because I think that it is the best reference collection on the Internet, but because I can almost always find an article on there on whatever topic I am searching for. Wikipedia is often criticised for being potentially inaccurate, and to some extent that is true as it is maintained by enthusiastic amateurs, after all. It does represent a good starting point for research and is generally not that bad.

When I started blogging I didn’t have any time schedule in mind, and I hadn’t settled on the target article size of 1000 words. As I recall the first few posts were sporadic and short. Some of the really early ones have been removed. It wasn’t until I settled on an article size of 1000 words and a publishing schedule of once a week that the blog took off (so far as I was concerned anyway) and I have been able to maintain the schedule over the last three years or so.

I originally intended to publish on a Saturday. This has slipped to Monday and I write these articles mainly on a Sunday. I’ve maintained this schedule for three years or so, and the nearest that I came to breaking the chain was when my sister was visiting and I didn’t have the time to write the articles. After she left I worked out how many weeks that I had missed and wrote and published the missing articles over a couple of weeks. It was one of the hardest things that I’ve done.



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I’ve taken inspiration from other bloggers. A friend of mine has a blog that he, until fairly recently updated with his photographs on a daily basis for many years. Well done, Brian!

Deadlines and milestones are, for me, the key to keeping up with this blog. Making a contract with myself to publish weekly affects no one else, unless someone out there is really waiting on the latest instalment of the blog, which I doubt.

Douglas Adams said about deadlines : “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.” However, when I’ve blogged before I’ve found that missing a deadline has been fatal to my attempts to keep a blog going. Sure, I’ve missed a few but caught up again, and my self-imposed deadline has slipped a couple of times, so there must be other factors.

I think that I probably passed a watershed where I might have stopped if I missed a deadline and that watershed may have been at the 50 or so mark, where I would have been reaching about a year of posts. Anyway the longevity of the blog certainly aids in continuing when things get sticky.



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Things do get sticky. Sometimes I sit down to write, on a Sunday usually, and nothing comes to mind. I’ve never experienced a total “writer’s block”, though. I get through it by basically waffling about something until a theme comes to mind. That is not the case this time though!

Milestones are what we strive for. I want to keep going at least until the 250 post mark, but earlier on in the blog the milestones were far more modest. When I reached 50 posts that was a significant milestone, as where 100, 150, and now, 200.

Milestones show us how far we have come, and if we have a destination in mind, how far we have to go. The thing about milestones is that they shouldn’t be too far apart, and indeed a mile could probably be very loosely described as a reasonable distance that can be covered in a reasonable amount of time, and is roughly one thousand paces as measured by Roman legions on the march.

If milestones (general ones, not the specific distance related ones) are too far apart, then we often break that distance down into smaller parts. For instance, if we have a boring job to do, say weeding a garden we may break it into chunks – this bit to that shrub, then that bit to the peonies, then the bit to the small tree, and so on.

All the smaller, quicker to accomplish tasks give targets that are short to complete but which still add up to the larger goal in the end. It’s funny how we fool ourselves in this and other ways.



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Seasons (again)

This is a bit of a repeat, since I almost forgot about writing this week. I decided to revisit the seasons thing.

English: Kukulkan at its finest during the Spr... — English: Kukulkan at its finest during the Spring Equinox. Chichen Itza Equinox March 2009. The famous descent of the snake at the temple. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We have just begun the season of Southern Hemisphere spring. This officially starts on 1st September and runs through to 1st December. Then summer starts and runs through to 1st March, then autumn runs through until 1st June, and winter extend to 1st September and the cycle repeats.

The reason that the seasons are defined like this goes back to 1780 when an organisation called “Societas Meteorologica Palatina” defined them as above. The organisation chose those dates because the seasons pretty much aligned with those dates in terms of temperature and rainfall and so on. The coldest three months in the Northern Hemisphere tended to be December, January and February, the warmest tended to be June, July and August, and so on.

Since the seasons are reversed in the Southern Hemisphere, the southern cycle is as described above. We have Christmas on the beach and spend July wrapped up and close to any source of heat!

Astronomers do it differently. They divide the year into four seasons, but the seasons are not aligned climatically, but are defined relative to the Earth’s position in its orbit around the Sun.

Because the Earth’s axis is tilted relative to its orbit around the sun, the axis is be tilted towards the sun at one time of the year and away from it six months later. When the axis is tilted towards the sun, the sun is at its highest in the sky and more energy is received on Earth per square metre than at any other time of the year. It’s summer and warmer. When it is tilted away, the sun is at its lowest and we receive less energy than at any other time of the year. It’s winter and colder. (But read on).

On Earth, when the sun is high it is in the sky longer than when it is lower. The day is therefore longest and the night is the shortest in the yearly cycle. When the sun is midway between its highest and its lowest, the day and the night are of equal length.

English: Midnight Sun in Tromsø, seen from the... — English: Midnight Sun in Tromsø, seen from the old port. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The time when the sun is highest or lowest in the sky is called a “solstice“, either a winter solstice, or a summer solstice. The times when it is half way are called “equinoxes“, either an autumnal equinox or a vernal equinox, and the night and day are equal in length. These are the four main signposts of the seasons, as used by astronomers.

Strictly speaking, to say “Today is the summer solstice” or “Today is the autumnal equinox” are incorrect. Since the day and night lengths are changing all the time, the solstices and equinoxes are points in time, not whole days.

English: Two equinoxes are shown as the inters... — English: Two equinoxes are shown as the intersection of the ecliptic and celestial Ecuador, and the solstice’s times of the year in which the Sun reaches its maximum southern or northern position. Español: Se muestran los dos equinoccios como la intersección del ecuador celeste y la eclíptica, y los solsticios momentos del año en los que el Sol alcanza su máxima posición meridional o boreal. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There are four lesser known and less important signposts of the seasons, they are Beltane, Lughnasadh, Samhain and Imbolc. I’ve used the Gaelic names, but they correspond, in order, to the Christian festivals of May Day, Lammas, Halloween, and St Brigid’s Day. These all fall more or less halfway between the four main seasonal signposts.

Astronomically the Winter Solstice, which occurs around 21st December in the Northern Hemisphere. Many sources identify the date of the solstice as the beginning of winter. Similarly the Summer Solstice is identified as the start of summer, and the equinoxes are identified as the start of their respective seasons.

This is odd, as the climatic seasons are usually considered to start three weeks earlier, with Northern Hemisphere winter climatically starting around the 1st December, and similarly for the other seasons. Starting the astronomical seasons on the 21st (or sometimes 22nd) of the month misses out 3 weeks or nearly a quarter of the season!

It’s also odd for another reason. The Northern Hemisphere winter solstice is when the sun is at its lowest point in its apparent position in the sky, so it is at its turning point in the cycle of the season and indeed the word “solstice” means “the point where the sun stands still”. It seems to me that this should be considered the mid point of the season, not the beginning of it.

This is obviously true for the summer solstice too, and the equinoxes, being halfway between the solstices are add the mid points of the sun’s climb or descent to the solstices. They too also should be the mid points of their seasons, not the beginning points.

If the solstices and equinoxes are the middles of their seasons, where are the start end points then? Well, they would then coincide with the Gaelic or pagan festivals of Beltane, Lughnasadh, Samhain, and Imbolc! For example Beltane is about halfway between the Northern Hemisphere spring equinox and summer solstice on 1st May.

Although Beltane is a Gaelic or pagan festival and has mostly fallen out of favour, some cultures do celebrate the festival and some of the customs persist, such as the custom of dancing around a Maypole. Beltane and the other three similar festivals coincide with important agricultural events, such as sowing seeds and gathering in of harvests, so were of interest in earlier times.

However, if the astronomical seasons starts and ends were to be moved to coincide with the Gaelic festivals they would not coincide with the climatic seasons. The reason for this is that there is a seasonal shift because of the time that the seas and land take to warm up in spring and to cool down in winter. This pushes the climatic seasons back a few weeks and the start of climatic spring in the Northern Hemisphere is pushed back to about the 1st March and the same for all the other seasons.

That’s why I think that the current idea of the astronomical seasons starting at the solstices and equinoxes is wrong! They should coincide with the Gaelic festivals instead, and then the astronomical and climatic seasons are related by the seasonal shift, instead of not being related properly at all.

Illumination of the earth during various seasons (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Upgrading



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I’ve just upgraded my desktop computer system. I’ve replaced the CPU, motherboard, RAM, power supply unit, and disk drive. In fact what I’ve really done is build a new computer in the existing case, keeping only my keyboard, mouse and monitor.

I’ve not had any problems, apart from the fact that the pesky little screws that hold things together seem smaller and more fiddly than I remember, but that may just be my ageing fingers.

Incidentally I replaced the existing hard disk drive with a solid state drive or SSD. This is neither disk shaped nor does it have any moving parts, so its name is a bit misleading.

I’d had the previous computer for several years, so why did I replace it? Well, it was getting a little slow and some things ran very slowly on it. When I did a backup it would slow almost to a crawl. Its slowness was my fault really as I was trying to run far too much stuff on it. If I merely browsed the Internet and received and sent mail, and got rid of all the other baggage that I had acquired, it would probably have sufficed.

A modest junk box (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

But where’s the fun in that! Having been system administrator in the past, I see interesting things coming through, like programs that simulate the running of an Android phone, so that you can write and test them on your desktop,. Wow! Now all I need is an idea for a killer app that can make me buckets of money.

So that went on the desktop, and I tried it out and lo! It worked fine. Then I moved on to something else and the killer app never got written. That seems to be the way that it goes with me – I see something cool, install it, and get it working, but once I get a handle on how it behaves, I lose interest.

I have nothing but admiration for people who have an idea, who then program it up, put it out there for people to try, and then deal with the inevitable bug reports and requests for enhancements and changes. Sometimes they modify and support the programs that they write for decades. Of course if they get bored with the whole thing, they can walk away from their baby and either the program becomes “abandonware” or someone else takes up the baton.

I can program though. I’ve written and supported programs and scripts which I’ve written for my job as systems administrator, and even at home I’ve written backup scripts and programs which are useful and, for the moment, complete, but I’ve got dozens of others which I started but did not complete for some reason or other.



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As an example, this blog uses WordPress as a platform. WordPress comes in two forms. There is the usual WordPress service, referred to as “WordPress.com” and there is “WordPress.org“.

The “dot org” version is an Open Source project with hundreds of volunteers writing code, packaging and otherwise making WordPress available to anyone wants to download it and use it on the computers that they operate and use.

Screenshot of WordPress interface (wordpress i... — Screenshot of WordPress interface (wordpress is under the GPL) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

However, many people don’t want to do download and run it themselves, either because they don’t have that sort of access to the computers that they use, or they are not technically competent enough, so the “dot com” version of the program is provided for people who simply want to use WordPress and not maintain it.

I set up this blog on WordPress.com initially, but wondered if it would be a good idea to run the WordPress.org version instead. So I downloaded it and installed it, and bingo! A clone of WordPress.com. Which was OK, but then I was faced with the need to find somewhere visible to host it – it’s no good having a blog if people can’t see it!

Multiple racks of servers (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In the end I decided to stay with WordPress.com as I didn’t need anything different from that version, and using WordPress.com avoid the hosting hassles. For a simple blog, without any esoteric bells and whistles, it is ideal. It can also be used for more complex situations, provided they don’t need changes to the core code.

Incidentally I started out with a Drupal site. I love Drupal and still have a Drupal site on my computer, which I tinker with occasionally. It’s a much more complex beast than WordPress (though WordPress is very flexible and extendable), but in the end, I don’t need the complexities at this time, so I moved to WordPress. One is not better than the other, they are just different.

drupal icon, svg version (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Of course, I’ve tried many other content management or blogging tools and frameworks. A framework can be thought of as a “do it yourself” type of website building tool, a few steps up from writing HTML, and several steps below a complete content management or blogging system.

All the discarded and forgotten stuff on my computer was obviously slowing it down, but arguably more importantly, technology has moved on. The old CPU had a single core, whereas the new one has ten! Two gigabytes of memory was proving restrictive. The disks were old and slow.

So the upgrade happened and I’m very pleased with it. The CPU (currently) barely breaks into a canter. The RAM is extensive, and I’m sure there are bits that haven’t been touched! Above all the new SSD is fast and my browser opens in a snap. No doubt I’ll think of things to eventually slow it down, but for the moment it is great. All the crud is gone, but I still have it backed up. Once a sysadmin always a sysadmin – always take backups of your backups and never throw anything away!

Above all it is quiet! There is no disk noise, and the CPU fan is also quiet. I was telling my daughter how quiet it was and sure enough we couldn’t hear it running. OK, there was a bit of ambient noise from the grand-rats and the dog, but it was quiet. It wasn’t until they had gone that I discovered that it was actually switched off! But it really is that quiet.

The Olympic Spectacle

English: The Olympic Flag flying in Victoria, ... — English: The Olympic Flag flying in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, outside the provincial legislature of British Columbia, in recognition of Vancouver’s hosting of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Olympics of course roll around every four years. I’m not particularly a sports fan, and in fact I don’t think that I’ve watched any of it this time, except for the excerpts on the evening news show. That doesn’t stop me feeling pleased whenever one of my countrymen wins a medal.

But much of the Olympics is not about the sport. Much of it is to do with how the host nation is coping with the huge sporting event, and this time the host nation, Brazil, has come under fire for a number of reasons. Obviously big spending on sport in a poor country is not a good look, and if things go wrong with the accommodation or the actual venues, then it looks even worse.



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Unfortunately it’s the nature of the beast for things to go wrong. There is a high need for accommodation, for athletes and officials and this pretty much has to be flung up in a hurry given the short time frames. Hence athletes arrive to find unfinished quarters and other such issues.

The same is true of the venues. In a country like Brazil where there isn’t a lot of money to spare, things like water pollution are a fact of life, and a rushed clean up is not going to fix that. Even in this country harbours and marinas can sometimes be less that perfectly clean. Such is life, in spite of strenuous efforts to clean things up.



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I believe it to be true that many of these sports venues may become white elephants after the games, especially those for the minor sports. It is unlikely that there will be the level of usage from local athletes after the Games that would permit them to be kept open. The accommodation areas may fare better in this respect as there is always a demand for accommodation. I believe that this is true for all past Olympic host nations, at least to some extent.

The Olympic Games do draw people to the host country, to spend money on tickets and accommodation, not to mention the myriad of trinkets and souvenirs that they will no doubt purchase. It’s questionable however whether or not the host country is going to profit in either the short term or the longer term from the Games. Of course they hope that people will enjoy themselves and maybe return to spend more money.



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News crews having been going out in Rio and asking the locals their opinions on the Games, and naturally, they are not very positive about them. If you are living in sub-standard accommodation and you see millions being spent on short term accommodation for visitors who will only occupy them for a few weeks, you would likely not be positive either. The locals’ opinions on the news crews who ask silly questions is not, however, recorded.

Most nations have one or two representatives. When a really small nation gets a medal of any colour, the world’s press tend to descend on the winner and breathlessly ask the same old questions. “How does it feel to win a medal?” and “How will the folks back home be feeling right now?”. Of course the athletes are ecstatic and the folks back home will be proud too. Such cookie cutter question and answer session are so predictable that they become amusing.

Of course, that not a comment on the amazing achievements of the athletes from small nations who win medals, some of whom will have scrimped and saved to attend the games and may not have had the opportunity to be coached by the best coaches, but it’s a comment on the predictability of the media’s responses.

Nations always have high hopes for their athletes, and are unreasonably disappointed when they come up against the best in the world and don’t do too well. Of course the athletes from a small nation don’t have the resources and coaches that the larger nations do, and so when an athlete from a small nation claims a medal, it is a significant event, not that this diminishes in any way the achievements of the athletes from the larger nations.



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There are many unique features of the Rio Olympic Games. One of them is the presence of athletes who are competing as refugees. They have (so far) obtained two medals, a gold and a bronze in shooting. These athletes (there are 10 of them) have undergone great hardships, often travelling long distances through multiple countries, and to nevertheless be able to take part in the Olympic Games and even win some medals shows a great deal of fortitude.

Another is the perceived risk from the Zika virus. It’s commendable that so many athletes have ignored the risk and come to Rio anyway. The only group that stayed away purportedly for this reason were some of the golfers. As the linked articles suggest there may have been other reasons for their absence.



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Brazil is not known as a particularly safe country to be in, though it isn’t thought to be as dangerous as many countries can be. However, there does not seem to have been much in the way of trouble between the local population and the athletes, support staff and spectators who have come to Rio.

One notable exception was the case of four American competitors who were supposedly robbed at gunpoint while celebrating a medal win. As it turned out, what really happened was that the four were drunk and trashed a service station. The station’s security guard pulled a gun to prevent them driving off and made them pay US$50 to cover the damage that they had done.



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Scandals are part of the Olympics, and the drugs scandal has been the worst so far. At one stage it looked as if the whole Russian team was going to be banned, as it was alleged that there was a government led doping programme in place.

While it was evident that some athletes do take performance enhancing drugs, the fact that in Russia this was actively encouraged by the state was a shock. In the end Russian athletes who could prove that they were clean were allowed to compete. While this is good for the athletes themselves, it was a let off for the Russian state doping scheme. This is not a good look for sport and unfair to other athletes.



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More on Quantum things

English: Schrödinger equation of quantum mecha... — English: Schrödinger equation of quantum mechanics (1927). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Schrodinger’s wave equation describes how the quantum state of a quantum system changes with time. Everett’s insight was that the observer of a quantum state was as much part of the system as the observed part of the system. Therefore they were “entangled” in the quantum sense and would be covered by a single quantum state equation.

If the observer and the observed are thus entangled, then so must be an observer who observes the quantum state of the observer and the observed. One can then extend this to the whole universe, which leads to the concept of a wave equation or function which describes the whole Universe.

That there is an equation for the universe is not really surprising and indeed, it is not surprising that it could be a quantum wave equation as the quantum world seems to form the basis of the physical, apparently classically described, world that we see.

I base this idea on the fact that everything that we sees appears to be describable in terms of a deterministic equation. It has been argued that such things as “psi phenomena“, but such claims are yet to be conclusively verified, with many putative examples having been discredited.



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Some people argue for a soul or mind as an example of a non-physical entity, but any such concept leaves a lot of questions to be asked. A non-physical entity cannot, by definition almost, be measured in any way, and there is difficulty in showing how such a non-physical entity can interact with physical ones, and therefore be noticed or detected.

By definition almost, a physical entity, such a body, is only influenced by physical things. If this were not the case we would see physical entities not following the laws of physics. For example, if it is possible to move an object by mind power or telekinesis, one would see the object disobeying fundamental scientific laws, like Newton’s First Law of Motion.

English: Isaac Newton Dansk: Sir Isaac Newton ... — English: Isaac Newton Dansk: Sir Isaac Newton Français : Newton (1642-1727) Bahasa Indonesia: Issac Newton saat berusia 46 tahun pada lukisan karya Godfrey Kneller tahun 1689 Lietuvių: Seras Izaokas Niutonas 1689-aisiais Македонски: Сер Исак Њутн на возраст од 46 години (1689) Nederlands: Newton geboren 4 januari 1643 Türkçe: Sir Isaac Newton. (ö. 20 Mart 1727) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The mind is a curious example of a physical entity which is often thought of as being non-physical. After all, a mind does not have a physical location, apart from the skull of the person whose mind it is, and it can’t be weighed as such.

The mind however is a pattern, on the brain, made up of the state of trillions of neurones. It is made up of information, and is much like a computer program which is made up of the state of a few billion physical logic circuits in the guts of the computer.

Open a computer and you won’t see “an image” anywhere. You will see patterns of bits of data in the memory, or on the hard disk, or maybe in transit, being sent to a computer screen. Similarly if you open someone’s skull you will not see an image there either. Just a bunch of neurones in particular states.

The one glaring exception to all the above, is, perhaps, consciousness. It’s hard to describe consciousness in terms of a pattern or patterns of the states of our neurones, but I believe that that is fundamentally what it is.

Some people argue that we are conscious beings, (true), and that we consciously make choices (false, in my opinion). When we look closely at any choice that we make, it appears to be that choice is in fact illusory, and that our actions are determined by prior factors.

People seem to realise this, although they don’t acknowledge it. When questioned, there is always some reason that they “choose” in a particular way. Perhaps they don’t have enough cash to choose the luxury option when out shopping, or their desire outweighs their financial state. When pushed people can always think of a reason.

To be sure, many “reasons” are actually post choice rationalisations, and choices may be based more on emotions than valid rational reasons, but whatever the emotions (such as the desire for an object), the emotions precede decision.

If, as sometimes happens, a person has to make a choice between two alternatives, that person can be almost paralysed with indecision. Even then, when a decision is finally made, it can be either a random choice, or maybe the person may say that they made a particular choice because they had decided a different way in another situation, or similar (e.g. they like the colour blue!).

If there is no non-physical component to the Universe, as appears very likely, and psi phenomenon do not exist, then everything has a cause. I don’t mean this in the sense that event A causes event B which causes C, but more in the sense that the slope that a marble is on causes it to move in a particular direction.

Causality seems to be a continuum thing, rather than the discrete A causes B case. We can only get an approximation of the discrete case if we exclude all other options. There is a latin term for this : ceteris paribus – all other things being kept the same. “Ceteris paribus” would exclude the case where a wind blowing up or across the slope changes the path of the marble.

For this reason I dislike the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Physics, as it is usually stated. The usual metaphor is a splitting movie film, which results in two distinct tracks in the future. I feel that a better picture would be a marble on a slope with a saddle.

The marble may go left, or it may go right, or it may even follow the line of the saddle. We still require “ceteris paribus” to exclude crosswinds, but there is no split as such. In a quantum model, the marble goes both left and right (and traverses the peak of the saddle with vanishing probability).

The probability that it goes left or right is determined by the wave equation for the system, and has a real physical meaning, which it doesn’t (so far as my knowledge goes) in the splitting metaphor.

I don’t know how my speculations stack up against the realities of quantum mechanics, but I like my interpretation, purely on aesthetic grounds, even if it is far from the mark!



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Many worlds or only one?

English: Position and momentum of a particle p... — English: Position and momentum of a particle presented in the phase space. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Scientists often use the concept of a “phase space“, which is basically a representation of all the possible states that a system may be in. For the trajectory of a thrown stone for instance, the phase space would be a four-dimensional space, comprising the three dimensions of space, which define where the stone is, and one of time, which defines when the stone is in a particular position.

The trajectory of the stone is a line in this 4-d space, as the location and time information about the stone is known exactly. However, the stone is not a point and maybe be spinning at the same time that the whole object is flying through the air. This means that the trajectory would actually be a complex four-dimensional worm in phase space.

An animated GIF of a tesseract (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

What if we were to introduce a probability factor into the experiment? Maybe we would set up the projectile to be triggered by an atomic decay or something similar. We would get a different worm depending on how long the atom takes to decay.

Clearly, if we want to show the all of the possible versions of the worm, the worm now becomes a sort of 4 dimensional sheet. Well, more like a 4-d duvet really, as the stone is not a point object.

Bedding comforter or duvet. Français : Couette... — Bedding comforter or duvet. Français : Couette (literie). Deutsch: Daunendecke, umgangssprachlich Federbett. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Within the 4-d duvet, each worm represents a case where the atom has decayed, and each of these cases has a probability associated with it. The probability can be expressed as the probability that the atom has decayed by that time or not, and can run from one to zero.

Actually the probability starts from zero and approaches one but doesn’t quite reach it. In practise in a group of atoms some will decay quickly and others will take longer. If there are a finite number of them, then the chances of any one lasting a long, long time are quite small, and all of the atoms are likely to decay in a moderately short time, a few multiples of the half-life anyway. However there will be a finite but microscopic in the extreme possibility, that an atom will survive for as long as you may consider.



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We can add another dimension to the phase space, one of probability. This gives us a five dimensional phase space, and the duvet becomes five dimensional. However, an atom decays at a certain time, and there is a single five dimensional worm in the phase space going forward. The space is no longer a phase space though, as a phase space, by definition, describes all possible states of the rock/launcher/atomic trigger, and doesn’t change.

According to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics the state of a quantum system is described by a set of probabilities. When a measurement of the system is made the state becomes certain, and it is said that the waveform described by the probability function has “collapsed”.

The famous thought experiment of Schrodinger’s Cat is a description of the difficulties of such a case. The cat is enclosed in a box equipped with a mechanism which will release a poison and kill the cat if triggered by the decay of an atom. At some time after the experiment starts the atom may or may not have decayed so the quantum states “decayed” and “not decayed” are superimposed, and therefore so are the states “dead” and “not dead” of the cat.

How do we know if the stone has been fired yet? Well, we go and look to see, and we either see the stone in its launcher or we don’t. Quantum physics says that the stone exists in a superposition of states – launcher and not launched. The question this raises is, if this is so, how does looking at the stone “collapse” the superposition when we look?

Three wavefunction solutions to the Time-Depen... — Three wavefunction solutions to the Time-Dependent Schrödinger equation for a harmonic oscillator. Left: The real part (blue) and imaginary part (red) of the wavefunction. Right: The probability of finding the particle at a certain position. The top two rows are the lowest two energy eigenstates, and the bottom is the superposition state \psi_N = (\psi_0+\psi_1)/\sqrt{2} , which is not an energy eigenstate. The right column illustrates why energy eigenstates are also called “stationary states”. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

That quantum superposition is real is indicated by any number of experiments, even though many physicists working in the field (including Schrodinger himself) have expressed discomfort at the idea.

In quantum physics the evolution of everything is defined by the Universal Wave Function. This can be used to predict the future of any quantum physical system (and all physical systems are fundamentally quantum physical systems). Unfortunately for easy understanding, interpretation leads to the superposition problem mentioned above.



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Many people have tried to resolve this issue, and the best success has been achieved by the exponents of the Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI), as described by Everett and championed by Bryce DeWitt and David Deutsch. The view of the MWI exponents is that the Universal Wave Function is fundamental and expresses a true picture of all reality. All of it, that is. Not just a physical system and its observer.

Everett’s view, as described in his thesis, is that an observer, as well as the object that he is observing is a subsystem of the system described by the Universal Wave Function. The wave function of these two subsystems does not describe a single state for each of these subsystems, but the states of the two subsystems are superposed, or in Everett’s term, correlated.

en:Many-worlds interpretation (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When a particle is observed it may appear to be in state A 70% of the time (correlated with a state A for the observer). Similarly it may appear to be in state B 30% of the time (correlated with a state B for the observer). This led Everett to postulate a ‘split’ of the universe into a state A and a state B. (The term ‘split’ appears to come from DeWitt’s interpretation of Everett’s work).

The probabilities don’t seem to have a function in this model, and this is odd. The probability that the cat is dead when you open the depends on how long you wait until you open the box. If you wait a long time the cat will more likely be dead than if you opened it earlier.

This means that the world splits when the cat is put in the box, as from any moment it can be alive or dead, but you do not find out which branch you are in until you open the box sometime later.

I’m ambivalent about the MWI. On the one hand it is a good explanation of what happens when a measurement is made or the cat’s box is opened, and it does away with the need for a waveform collapse, which Everett argued against in his paper. However it is profligate in terms of world creation.

Another issue is that the split is decidedly binary. The cat is alive in this world and dead in that one. However most other physical processes are, at the macro level anyway, continuous. When a scientist takes a measurement he writes down, for example, 2.5, but this is only inaccurate value as it is impossible to measure something exactly and it may be wrong by up to 0.05 on either side of 2.5 (given the one decimal point value shown).

Consequently, I’d prefer an interpretation where there is no split, but instead a continuum of possibilities as part of a single world. Maybe the single path that we tread through life is an illusion and across the Universe, by virtue of the Universal Wave Function, we experience all possibilities, though to us it feels like we are only experiencing the one.



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What comes next?

Democracy is the system of government favour by most enlightened countries. It’s a simple system, where all citizens can partake in making decisions about the state’s affairs. It sounds fair, doesn’t it? However, many people can’t be bothered to actually take part – often fewer than half the eligible voters actually bother to vote.

This is good in one sense and bad in another. It’s good because it shows that the government is pretty much doing what the voters want, otherwise they would be up in arms, and it is bad because it devolves the running of the country to a few motivated individuals, who naturally favour their own views on what is good for the country.

If we look at our fellow citizens, we see people like us. We see people with the same point of view as us. We see people with opposite points of view. We see a fair number of weirdos and nutters. We see people who are intelligent, we see people who can only be called dumb.

All these people have the same ability to decide who runs the country as we do. Democracy averages out the abilities and views of the voting population, and once again this is good and bad. It is good because everyone has an input in the running of the country and bad because any decision is dumbed down to the average voter who has average intelligence.

The Representative of Humanity, detail of a sc... — The Representative of Humanity, detail of a sculpture in wood by Rudolf Steiner and Edith Maryon. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Democracy is nevertheless the best system that we have used so far, at least in the opinion of most of the voters in a democracy! Many other countries aspire to being democratic in the medium term.

Most countries don’t have direct democracy. The citizens can’t all go along to where the government plies its business and have a direct say in what happens. Most democracies are representative democracies, where the people in a geographic area select one of their number to go along and make the decisions on their behalf. Such selections happen on a regular basis, so that voters can review their selection for their representative and change it if necessary.

In recent years this country has moved further away from direct democracy and a new type of representative helps govern the country. This new type is selected not by the people themselves but by a political party. Voters have to vote for one party or another to affect the selection of these party representatives, and this removes from the voters the ability to directly select about half the representatives.

So, as we move further and further away from direct democracy, we have to decide if this is ultimately good or bad, and whether or not we need to replace democracy with some other system of governing our countries.

In the past we have tried many other systems. We have tried feudalism, where one person governs a smallish area and has a great deal more rights than the peasants, but that was slowly overturned as power was drained from the rulers and, mostly, given to the peasants.

Feudalism can’t have been all bad, given the times, as it would have been a bad idea for the lord to severely mistreat his serfs, as the serfs did all the work of raising crops and cattle, and if the serfs weren’t able to work, the lord went hungry. The lord also provided protection to the serfs in his domain, should a neighbouring lord fancy what the serfs created.



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The local bigwig may not have been a lord. Religion was strong in those times and the ruler may have been a priest or bishop. The biggest bigwig of all, would be the king (or sometimes the queen). The bigwigs were ranked and only the most powerful got to advise the king – the whole system was basically a pyramid.

Even when the feudal system died out, royalty and the system of titles and rights persisted. Some rights have persisted anachronistically to this day – for instance the right to graze pigs on acorns on common land may still exist, even though the right may not be exercised.

Many countries do not have democracy, but they do have a ruler or ruling class. This ruler has almost as many rights as a king, but he or she only rules because he or she has the power base to allow him or her to do so. Usually but not always this requires at least the cooperation of the military, and the top dog may well be a member of the military.

All rulers stand the risk of being replaced. Some rulers may still officially rule, but with reduced powers and rights. Queen Elizabeth II is one such ruler, and she may be replaced with some other titular head of state at some stage, perhaps a President. Other rulers may be overturned by force, by revolution, and this is a frequent case where the ruler is heavy-handed and oppressive.

Whatever the political system, even in communist systems where all are supposedly equal, there is a “head of state”. Usually he/she is a powerful individual and the government he/she presides over may be democratic or not. The President of the USA is frequently called the most powerful man (or maybe, soon, woman) on Earth and the USA is nominally democratic.

Our democracies seem to be hierarchical, as do our non-democracies. While democracy seems to work, more or less, in many countries, other countries seem to get along with other systems. Some have heads of state who are called dictators as they rely on power to remain at the top.

Sometimes a powerful country will force democracy onto such countries, but it doesn’t always work properly. This rises the question as to whether or not democracy is the best system for such countries, and perhaps it isn’t.

Democracy is the best system that we have come up with so far, but all systems eventually change or mutate and are replaced with other systems. Maybe democracy will be looked on in the future as being a quaint system that was only a step or two better than feudalism.

Or maybe online systems will enhance democracy so that it becomes an accurate and agreeable way of running countries. I doubt it as most people will not partake in online democracies through lack of interest or motivation. A true democracy requires everyone to take part fully in governing a country.

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