Society – Page 6 – Me on the net

The End of (Western) Civilisation

In much of the world capitalism holds sway and there is no denying that, as an economic and social system) it has benefited humanity to a great extent. It has built the great global technological empires that give residents in “western” societies all the consumer goods that we enjoy.

It has provided well for its citizens in general with the standard of living in western societies being the envy of other people in other nations, to the extent that they strive to move to western societies even if their homelands are not embroiled in war and tyranny.

Monument to the fallen in the fight against fa... — Monument to the fallen in the fight against fascism and capitalism in the centre of village Skravena, Bulgaria. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

But capitalism has its faults, and to some extent it can be likened to a car without brakes. A car without brakes is still driveable, and it is still steerable and can stay on the road until it hits a downhill stretch. Then the driver cannot control the car as it gets faster and faster down the hill and the inevitable will eventually occur.

Capitalism tends to vest power in the businesses and organisations that benefit from it. It tends to concentrate the capital from which it gets its name, of course, in a few individuals and while it benefits most people, there are small but growing number who slide to the bottom of the heap for one reason or another.

The people at the bottom of the heap are not totally without the benefits of the capitalist system. They mostly have televisions for example, which would have been considered a luxury a few decades ago.

However, they often have difficulty with food, accommodation, schooling and medicine. Any jobs that they get will be generally low skilled and low paid. They may even have to work two or more jobs just to get by.

In many western societies houses are becoming more expensive, as measured against family incomes. As houses of their own are out reach for them, they generally rent their accommodation, either from the state or private landlords. Even then they feel the effects of rising house prices in their rent, and often they are forced to rent houses which have serious defects, like damp and mould.

Landlords are of course subject to the capitalism system and are reluctant to spend much money on repairs and so on, as any such expenditure comes out of their pockets. Houses that they let out are often allowed to deteriorate badly.

For those at the bottom of the heap, schooling may be an issue. While the state provides schools, not all schools are the same. A school in an upmarket suburb is almost always better resourced and has better teachers than a school in a poorer area. It’s no surprise, then, when the upmarket schools perform better in terms of qualifications achieved by the pupils.

Access to medical care is often a problem for those at the bottom of the heap. If a trip to the doctor costs $50, as it may well do, then that is a big chunk out of the family budget, and any prescribed medicines will at to the burden. As people get older, they may no longer be able to work and yet this is the time in their lives that they may need medical care more often. In contrast, a people higher up the scale will be more able to pay to have hip operations and so on performed privately.



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People at the top of the scale often look down on those at the bottom as being lazy benefit bludgers who are unwilling to work. This is in most cases untrue. The barriers to rising from poverty to plenty are many, and are in the main insurmountable for many.

The poor are not stupid in the main, though many may not be the brightest of people, and the chances of making it off the bottom rung of the ladder are off putting to many. There are always stories of people making it against the odds, as the saying goes, but in most ways those who succeed in rising up the scale merely reflect the odds.



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999 out of a thousand triers will fail, regardless of drive and ambition. Many will therefore not bother. Even if they did try, they might raise the odds to 2 in a thousand, scarcely any better. It truly is a trap at the very bottom of the heap.

The capitalist system is not able to provide for people in their old age when they are unable to work too. One can put aside a portion of one’s income to help provide for old age but many do not bother, and even they do, the portion that they can put aside depends on their position of the scale of wealth. A poor person, living from hand to mouth, may have no income that he or she can put away for old age.

Traditionally, at least in the last century or so, the state has helped out by providing a guaranteed income for old age in the shape of a pension. However this still has to be paid for and taxes are the way that it is usually done, which means that the richer people will pay for the poorer peoples’ pensions.

It has reached the state in many western societies that welfare, that is schooling, medicine and provision for old age is no longer affordable for society. This is a coming crisis that the current capitalist system cannot avert. It is not exaggeration that it may be the end of civilisation as we know it.



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If the poor can no longer be sustained by the system, then stratification will definitely occur. The “have nots” who outnumber the “haves” will become jealous of them, and that may lead to actual conflict between the classes.

It is not an issue that can be addressed by merely changing the distribution, by effectively taking from the rich and giving to the poor, as this is unfair to those who are considered rich, and will be ineffective anyway, as it provides no incentive for the poor to provide for themselves.



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But if nothing changes, things will get worse and worse until conflict, pestilence, famine and death spread in waves across the Earth. That is, unless we find a better, and fairer societal system.

The original Four Horsemen of Apocalypse. Pane... — The original Four Horsemen of Apocalypse. Panel from X-Factor #24. Art by Walt Simonson. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Heaven and Hell



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What if there is an afterlife? Personally I don’t believe in one, but still. What would it be like? The Christian version is that you get judged on your behaviour in this life then go to either heaven or hell. Some versions of Christianity require that you are at the very least baptised, or that you experience being “saved” or that you have taken part in certain rituals before your worldly behaviour is considered.

These lead to awkward questions about, for instance, babies who die before they have a chance to be baptised or whatever. Will they be condemned for ever? I hardly seems fair and various versions of Christianity have ways of getting around this issue. Some suggest that such babies go to a third type of afterlife where they experience neither heaven nor hell – a sort of post life waiting room, which to me seems to be a particularly cruel version of hell!

What is heaven like, though? It must be a pleasant place, as it is a given that it is a reward for a good life, and it has been suggested that it is a place where, the Deity, God, is glorified and worshipped, where all is light, and all the “souls” there experience the joy of being in the presence of the Deity.

Since no one who has died has reported back, the sources for these ideas come from speculation presented as fact, or, as some claim, divine inspiration, an actual message from the Deity. There’s a world of difference between these two options. In other words, it’s either a complete fiction, or absolute fact.

What could we logically deduce, given, for the sake of argument, the existence of an afterlife? It could be that we are reborn in this world, as either a new human or an animal. However, no human can remember any previous existence on this earth, or even on a planet circling a star somewhere across the Universe.



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Of course some people claim to remember previous lives, but strangely, these remembered lives are frequently people who were famous when they were alive, like Anne Boleyn or Shakespeare, and the people who claim to be such reincarnated people often get well documented details of their lives wrong. Of course, history may be wrong, completely wrong, but it is more likely that people who claim to remember previous lives are mistaken or even purposefully deceitful.

If we dismiss the idea of reincarnation, what then? Certainly we can throw away all we know of physics. The only thing that we can be sure of is that things will be different. It may well be that there would be something analogous to our usual physics in play but we have no way of knowing what that would be.

English: Stylized light cone based on the logo for the World Year of Physics 2005. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It may be that personality as such would not exist. No meeting with a previously expired spouse in the afterlife would occur, as the personality of the spouse would not exist, and nor would the personality of the recently expired person.

If personalities of the dead did exist in the afterlife, then this could cause issues. What if the recently expired person had remarried after a spouse had previously died. Which of the two spouses would be matched up with the recently expired person? Maybe the physics would be similar to our current physics, but different enough that one person could spend eternity with two or more people?



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I get the impression that there are many more versions or varieties of hell postulated than there are heavens. Visions of hell are often detailed and gruesome. One only needs to look at the right most panel of “The_Garden_of_Earthly_Delights” by Hieronymous Bosch” to see some extreme examples.

Hell is punishment for transgressions in this world. Punishment extends “for all time” which would seem harsh as, surely any sin would be expiated eventually, just as any punishment with the exception of capital punishment in this world is time limited. However this assumes that time in this world is the same as time in the next world, and this may not be so.

Eternity may pass in a different way in the next world – maybe how eternity feels to the sufferer may depend on the seriousness of the transgressions. That may be fairer than for a minor transgressor to suffer through an endless time, judged by the standards of this world.

In accounts of heaven and hell both have inhabitants who have never (so far as I understand it) ever been mortal or human. Angels inhabit heaven and devils and demons live in hell. In both realms the job of the inhabitants appears to be to provide direction for the souls or entities from this world. Angels presumably assist in providing the dead souls with their appropriate rewards and devils and demons punish the transgressors.



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Over the centuries people have imagined or vouchsafed a vision of heaven and hell. It seems that both heaven and hell have a hierarchy of inhabitants. The hierarchies are power hierarchies with the Deity at the top of the one, and the anti-Deity at the top of the other one. This is either a reflection of the prejudices of the person who is imagining these realms, or an interesting structural characteristic or heaven and hell.

Naturally hell is nasty and heaven is nice. I don’t know if it is some cultural bias as a result of my background and upbringing, but it seems to me that the stories and legends of hell are much more detailed than the stories and legends of heaven. My thought is that people are more interested in the gruesomeness of hell than the niceness of heaven.

Certainly the Wikipedia articles on heaven and hell support this theory, as the section on the Christian hell is much longer than the corresponding article on the Christian heaven. The Christian heaven merely has “many mansions“, while the Christian hell is more complex. In fiction especially as exemplified by Milton’s Paradise Lost, and in myth as in Egyptian beliefs hell can be envisaged as complex hierarchies.

But basically, we have no way of knowing for sure if heaven and hell are real and separate realms from our standard world. There can be no physical contact between such realms and our own, since physics describes only the behaviour of things within a single realm and it has no purview outside of that.

We can’t know for sure, so while we may think that they exist and believe in heaven and hell, we should look for our ethics only in this world. Any other course is illogical.

Photography, Ancient and Modern

19th century studio camera, with bellows for f... — 19th century studio camera, with bellows for focusing (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When I looked up the date when photography was invented I was surprised that it was first tried in 1800, if you allow the word to mean the capturing by some means or other an image created by some means or other!

While optics were known and understood well before this time, no one apparently thought of using glass to create images of views, people or anything else. If they did, there appears to be no record. Also the technology didn’t exist to record any image so created, so it would have been pointless to do so anyway, though artists may have been able to benefit from an image projected onto a canvas as a guide.

The geometry of a pinhole camera as seen from ... — The geometry of a pinhole camera as seen from the X2 axis (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So before “the camera” we had “the camera obscura”. A camera obscura is basically a darkened room with an image created by a pinhole camera projected onto a white screen. They are fascinating to visit and I highly recommend visiting one.

When the means for creating an image (a lens) came together with a means of capturing the image photography was born. At first the techniques were hit and miss with wet plates coated in chemicals to capture the image and simple lens to create the image, and a long exposure time.

But techniques and technologies quickly improved and exposure times came down. In the early days, when sitting for a photograph, the long exposure times meant that braces had to be used to prevent the sitter from inadvertently moving and spoiling the photograph.

The image of a photographer in those days was of a man hiding under a dark cloth doing mysterious things with his camera, maybe firing off a tray of flash powder to record the image on a glass plate, then dashing off to his “dark room” to process and fix his image onto the glass plate with dangerous chemicals. The end result was an image with light and dark reversed, a so-called “negative”.

New dark room, Boston Camera Club, Bromfield St. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Some of these early cameras were works of art, with shining brass trimming, great leather bellows and polished wood bodies and plate holders, all mounted on a substantial tripod. Great brass screws could move the lens closer to or further from the body which held the plate and often could move the lens up and down or from side to side to compensate for perspective distortions.

Several things eventually brought photography in reach of the man in the street. Firstly, it became possible to record the images onto a strip of plastic, which meant that the camera only had to be loaded once in a while. At the same time, it became possible for you to hand your film to the local chemist or apothecary and have the films developed and positive images printed on cards.

The rise of mass production allowed cameras to be produced very cheaply, and the Box Brownie arrived, costing two British pounds. Anyone could be a photographer. To be sure corners had to be cut, so the Brownie was a simple box with small and very simple lens, and the shutter was simply a plate that usually blocked light from entering.

On pressing the shutter lever a spring was tightened until the plate flicked over, giving the lens a brief look at the outside world. The film strip was held on one spool and transferred to another. A window in the back of the camera showed the backing strip of the film and you would the film on until the next number showed in the window.

The user aimed the camera by using a crude “viewfinder”. This was simply a window in the top of the camera which allowed the photographer to look down on a tiny mirror which reflected the view in front of the camera. It was around a centimetre wide and pointed only more or less in the same direction. To switch from landscape mode to portrait mode you turned the camera over and looked into a similarly minute viewfinder!

Of course things rapidly moved on from there. People loved the Box Brownie and soon handheld cameras of all sorts appeared. Some had two linked lens arranged piggy back style as in the Rollieflex, and some had a single lens, like the Hasselblad. Those two were high end machines, and featured switchable components and high quality lenses and other accessories. They tended to be favoured by professional photographers.

Most other cameras were built on a different design, though. Most featured a eye level viewfinder, and cheaper ones usually didn’t have interchangeable accessories. Most moved away from the spool to spool system to the 35mm cassette. Really cheap cameras eventually had a drop in cassette system.

Two other big changes were the introduction of colour film and the single lens reflex system. Many photographers used to monochrome film were appalled by the advent of colour film and swore never to change to it. Most amateurs adopted it with enthusiasm of course. Eventually everyone (almost) used colour.

The single lens reflex system allowed the photographer to see exactly what he was shooting as the viewfinder looked through the same lens through which the image was captured. Generally the viewfinder was eye level but the Hassleblad was an exception retaining the waist level view point.

The more expensive cameras had knobs, dials and buttons all over them, but the cheaper varieties had only a few, and some did not have any controls. All used film cassettes and most had flash devices for low light level conditions.

Then along came digital. Film disappeared, to be replaced by flash storage. Most cameras lost their viewfinders, which were replaced by small screens covering the whole of the back of the camera. Many settings could be set using the screen and a few buttons, and the cameras sizes shrunk. Some these days are credit card size.

But now, it seems that the so called “compact digital cameras” have briefly had their day. Every smartphone has an embedded camera, and people are not buying the compacts. Some smartphones now come with Leica lens technology.

The result? Billions (if I’m not mistaken) of absolutely atrocious photographs spamming the Internet. From cute cats to drunken revellers, everything is now floating around out these. But I’m optimistic. Real photographs and real photographers are still out there. Somewhere.



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Capitalism

A free market is one in which there is no government, monopoly or other authoritative interference in the workings of a market. However there is in practise no such thing, as there are always constraints on a market from one or more of those sources.

For instance, in a small country there may be only two or three organisations which are involved in the whole supply chain, and if they are much the same size there is no drive to compete strongly. If one large competitor decided to drive another large competitor out of the market, it would be expensive and difficult, and would more likely than not trigger monopoly prevention legislative mechanisms.

An example of a cover from a Monopoly video game (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

On the other hand, a small competitor might be worth an aggressive approach as an attack could be targeted and localised. It would be cheaper and while it might raise a few worries about lack of choice (in an area), it would not trigger any monopoly laws.

An open market goes hand in hand with the laws of supply and demand. Generally these are expressed as graphs showing the intersection of the supply curve (an upwards trending line) with the demand curve (a downwards trending line). Any change in conditions is shown by other lines more or less parallel to the first.

Fig5 Supply and demand curves (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

These curves can only be illustrative as they are almost never drawn with quantified axes, and the curves are drawn without the use of any measured data. They are arbitrary. Nevertheless they purport to show the effect of market changes on the equilibrium or balance point where the curves cross.

While the laws of supply and demand may be true in the sense that if either the price or demand changes the other also changes, the graphs are of little practical use, and they are only marginally mathematical, as definite mathematical conclusions cannot be made from them. It is impossible to quantify the effect on demand of raising the price of a can of beans by 10c, for example.

Nevertheless one could probably use the graphs to suggest that if the price changes in one direction the demand will move in another direction, and these guesses may be used to decide on price changes. It’s definitely a guess, though as the opposite may happen – if you put up a sign saying “Beans now $1.55 per can”, having raised the price by $0.05, you may sell more as you have drawn the customers’ attention to the beans.

The “Free Market”, the “Laws of Supply and Demand”, and the principle of “Laissez Faire” are part of the backbone of Capitalism. Capitalism is a robust economic system which has achieved immense feats and advances. It has harnessed science and sent men to the Moon, given us a computer and communication devices in our pockets. There is no doubt that Capitalism has been hugely successful.

In spite of its amazing successes, there have always been drawbacks to Capitalism. The trend of prices is to rise continually, though at times, they do fall, as demand reduces in recessions and market collapses. These recessions and collapses hurt the poor much more than the rich, as the poor have fewer resources to cope with these setbacks.

Capitalist markets lead to concentration of resources, especially money, in the hands of the rich, and a scarcity of resources in the hands of the poor. It leads to the growth of large market dominating firms, as one firm succeeds while others fail. The successful firm often widens its control of the market by purchasing up and coming smaller firms or older firms who themselves may control a smaller market niche.



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Capitalism fosters the growth of the gap between the very rich and the very poor. It is often argued that, in countries where the economic system is Capitalist in nature, the “poor” have much more in the way of consumer items than their parents could have imagined. Most people have a car. Most people have a television. Most have a cellphone.

This is all true, but that is only because these items are both essential and relatively cheap. At the same time, health care is becoming unaffordable for many of the new poor. Schooling is also a huge drain on the poorer families. Many poor people work at multiple jobs to bring up their children and pay for the operations that their parents are coming to need.



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As a result, many of the new poor live from day-to-day, with no real opportunity to save for retirement or to lay by a little money to allow for the vicissitudes of life. A small accident that requires time off work and consequently reduction of income becomes a disaster in such a situation.

Capitalism stratifies society and the bottom strata, often those with a lack of education or intelligence, lags behind those who are in higher strata. Those at the highest levels tend to outstrip those at lowest levels until their wealth, to those in lower strata, appears as meaningless numbers. What the difference between $100 and $1000 to those at the bottom? It’s a huge amount. What about the difference between $10 billion and $100 billion? It’s irrelevant.

Capitalist market forces tend to favour those who already have over those who don’t and the barriers that prevent those in the lower strata from moving up are immense. Those few who make are the lucky ones. Yes, luck plays almost as big a part in entrepreneurial success as luck does in winning the lotto.

Capitalism is the best economic system that we have ever had, without a doubt. It is however not without its flaws. Socialism is not a good economic system, but purports to deal with the issues of poverty by redistribution of wealth. (Maybe I’ll do a piece on socialism’s flaws at some time).

Karl Marx (1818-1883) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Capitalism however does not deal with poverty or the poor. Some effects do trickle down and today’s poor appear rich in comparison with the corresponding strata in the past, but the fundamental poverty still exists.

It would be nice to think that there is some other system, waiting for someone to discover it. The odds are probably good, as no system lasts forever. What it would look like I’ve no idea. We would need to get a much better scientific view of the so-called social sciences to really solve this fundamental problem.

Simple Arithmetic

There periodically appears on the Internet an arithmetic type of puzzle. Typically it will be a string of small natural numbers and a few arithmetic operations, such as “3 + 7 x 2 – 4” and the task is to work out the result.

The trick here is that people tend to perform such a series of calculations strictly from left to right, so the sequence goes:

3 + 7 = 10, 10 x 2 = 20, 20 – 4 = 16. Bingo!

Most mathematicians, and people who remember maths from school would disagree however. They would calculate as follows:

7 x 2 = 14, 3 + 14 = 17, 17 – 4 = 13. QED!

Why the difference? Well, mathematicians have a rule that states how such calculations are to be performed. Briefly the calculations is performed from left to right, but if a multiplication or division is found between two numbers, that calculation is performed before any additions or subtractions. In fact the rule is more complex than that, and a mnemonic often used to remember it is “BODMAS” or “BEDMAS” (which I’m not going to explain in detail here. See the link above).



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This rule is only a convention and so is not followed everywhere, so there are various “correct” answers to the problem. Also, there are still ambiguities if the conventions are applied which could cause confusion. However, most people with some mathematical training would claim that 13 is the correct answer.

Interestingly, computer programming languages, which are much stricter about such things, codify the precedence of operations in a calculation exactly, so that there can be no ambiguity. It is the programmers task to understand the precedence rules that apply for a particular language.

In most cases the rules are very, very similar, but it is the documentation of the language which describes the rules of precedence, and wise programmers study the section on operator precedence very closely.

There are ways of specifying an arithmetic problem uniquely, and one of those (which is sometimes of interest to programmers) is “Reverse Polish Notation“. Using this my original puzzle becomes “3 7 2 x + 4 -” which looks odd until you understand what is going on here.

Illustration of postfix notation (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Imagine that you are traversing the above list from left to right. First you find the number “3”. This is not something you have to do, like “+”, “-“, “x” or “/”, so you just start a pile and put it on the bottom. The same goes for “7” and “2”, so the pile now has “3” on the bottom and “2” at the top and “7” in the middle.

Next we come across “x”. This tells us to do something, so we pull the last two things off the pile and multiply them (7 x 2 = 14) and stick the result, “14” back on the stack which now contains “3” and “14”. The next thing we find is “+” so we pluck the last two things off the pile “3” and “14” and add them, putting the result “17” back on the (empty) pile.



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Next up is “4” which we put on the pile, and finally, we have “-“, so we pull the two last elements from the pile (“17” and “4”) and subtract the second from the first, giving “13” (Yay!) and that is the answer which we put back on the stack. The stack now contains nothing but the answer.

This looks confusing, but that may be because we are used to the conventional left to right way of doing things. It is actually easier for a computer to understand the RPN version of the puzzle and there are no ambiguities in it at all. Technically, it’s a lot simpler to parse than the conventional version.

Image for use in basic articles dealing with p... — Image for use in basic articles dealing with parse trees, nodes, branches, X-Bar theory, linguistic theory. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Parsing is what happens when you type a command into a computer, or you type something complex, such as a credit card number into the checkout section of a web site. The computer running the web site takes your input and breaks it up if necessary and checks it against rules that the programmer has set up.

So, if you type 15 numbers or 17 numbers into the field for the credit card number, or you type a letter into the field by mistake, the computer will inform you that something is wrong. Infuriatingly, it may be not be specific about what the trouble is!

Español: Un Guru meditation en una amiga (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Anyway, back to the arithmetic. It grates with me when people make simple arithmetical errors and then excuse themselves with the phrase “I never was much good at maths at school”! That may well be true, but to blame their problems with arithmetic of the whole diverse field of mathematics.

It’s like saying “I can’t add up a few numbers in my head or on paper because I missed the class on elliptic functions“! It’s way over the top. For some reason people (especially those who can’t get their head around algebra) equate the whole of mathematics with the bit that they do, which is the stuff about numbers, which is arithmetic.

As we evolved, we started counting things. It’s important to know if someone has got more beans than you or that you have enough beans to give everyone one of them. We invented names for numbers and names for the things (operations) we did on them.

We did this without much thought about what numbers actually are. We as a species have only relatively thought deeply about numbers fairly recently, and we only discovered such things as real numbers and geometry in the last couple of thousand years so it is not surprising that the average brain has yet to expand to cope with the more advanced mathematical concepts.

Graphic showing the relation between the arith... — Graphic showing the relation between the arithmetic mean and the geometric mean of two real numbers. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This could be why so many people these days equate fairly simple arithmetic with mathematics as a whole – our brains are only now coming to grips with the concept that there is more to maths than simply manipulating numbers with a very few simply operations.

It may be that the average human brain never will get to grips with more advanced maths. After all, people can survive and thrive in the modern world with on a rudimentary grasp of mathematics, the arithmetic part.

Some human brains however do proceed further and much of modern society is the result of mathematics in its wider sense applied to the things that we see around us. For instance, we could not have sent men to the moon without advanced mathematics, and technology relies heavily on mathematics to produce all sorts of things. It’s a good things that some brains can tell the difference between the field of arithmetic and mathematics as a whole.

Here be Dragons

Dragons, big scaly fire breathing reptiles. So many of our folk tales and even many modern tales include dragons as an important component, usually as a hostile force. Of course in many tales the dragon is merely a device to give the hero some seemingly impossible difficulty to overcome.

Sometimes dragons are mere beasts, but in some tales they are intelligent, if malevolent, beasts. Smaug, in “The Hobbit” by J R R Tolkien is of the latter kind. He sits on a pile of treasure and is furious when Bilbo Baggins steals a golden cup. He later accuses Bilbo of trying to steal from him (which is true).

The patron saint of England is Saint George, who was an early Christian martyr. Saint George is noted for slaying a dragon to save a princess. The princess was intended as a sacrifice to the dragon who was causing sickness in the inhabitants of the local town.

In legends, once a dragon has been killed, it’s body, blood and teeth could be used for various purposes. Sometimes the blood was beneficial to humans, conferring invincibility or other virtue, or it could be poisonous. The teeth could be sowed to raise armies, sometimes of skeletons.



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Most fictional and mythical dragons are scaly reptiles, but one of the odd ones out is the furry creature called the “Luck Dragon” in the film “The NeverEnding Story”. This dragon had a head resembling that of a dog, front limbs and a tapering furry body which merged into a tail.

Most fictional dragons are noble creatures, but the “Swamp Dragons” created by Terry Pratchett in his discworld series of books which are altogether baser than the “Noble Dragons“. Swamp dragons are small creatures, are almost always ill (because of their diet) and are prone to explode if very ill or excited.

English: The Nine Dragon Wall in the Beihai Pa... — English: The Nine Dragon Wall in the Beihai Park, a large imperial garden in central Beijing (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

On one occasion one exploded after being enraged at the sight of itself in a mirror, imaging that it was in the presence of a rival. It does appear though that the fraught gastric processes may have a reason – a swamp dragon is described as flying on its stubby wings by emitting gasses created by its digestive processes.

Some dragons can apparently be tamed. In Anne McCaffrey’s Pern of books series, a partnership has developed between the flying dragons and humans to deal with the threat of “thread” which comes from a companion planet and is inimical to all life forms on Pern.

All the Weyrs of Pern (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

These dragons, which similar the standard dragon type from mythology, are large enough to be ridden by humans, and breath fire to kill the thread on being fed a particular type of rock. The dragons are genetically modified from the much smaller fire lizards and communicate with their riders by telepathy.

One unique ability of these dragons is to teleport from place to place carrying their riders with them. It also becomes apparent that they can also time travel while teleporting, Unsurprisingly, Terry Pratchett created a cameo parody or homage to the Pern books and their dragons in the first book of his discworld series, “The Colour of Magic”.

The Discworld as it appears in the SkyOne adap... — The Discworld as it appears in the SkyOne adaptation of The Colour of Magic. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Where there are dragons, the untamed variety, The more I think about them, the more I remember cases of dragons in literature and in films. A fairly recent example is the film “How to Train Your Dragon“. The dragons are at first treated as hostile, but the aspiring dragon killer, Hiccup, finds an injured dragon, it transpires that the dragons are friendly creatures and only attack humans because the humans are attempting to exterminate them.

The modern dragon is built along the same physical plan, whatever the media they are described in. Dragons are reptiles, usually lay eggs, mostly have four legs or limbs and a pair of wings. Mostly they breathe fire, and where this is touched on, it is usually implied that the fire is generated internally by ingesting and digesting rocks.

Saint George and the Dragon at Casa Amatller (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

However, early myths about dragon describe dragons as more akin to large serpents, even to the extent of having no limbs. Indeed, in early texts, the word used for dragons also means serpent.

Interestingly, although England’s patron saint is a dragon killer, the red dragon has come to symbolise Wales. “Y Ddraig Goch” is a red dragon and can be found on the Welsh national flag. He attains ascendency over an invading white dragon who symbolises the Saxons, after a long battle and an interval when both dragons were imprisoned in a hill in Snowdonia.

Dragons are associated power. Having scales and claws, and being able to breath fire, are attributes that give them strong defensive and offensive capabilities. Their size gives them strength and they are a very great challenge to any heroes who take them on. Often they can only be defeated by trickery or luck, such as when Smaug was killed because he had a small unprotected area on his belly which allowed the hero to shoot fatally in that one spot.

Dragons are associated with magic, with wizards, witches, princes and princesses and supernatural items and events of all sorts. “Dungeons and Dragons” melds all these factors into a table top and role playing game which was popular in the 1970s and 1980s.

However, dragons as such do not appear to be a large factor in the game, which revolves more around the characters who may be clerics, fighters or magic users. Dungeons and Dragons does have monsters and while some may be dragons, there are many other types of monsters, which may or may not be controlled by other players taking part in the game.

Finally, to bring this ramble through the topics dragons to a close, I will mention one other dragon that I recall from films, and that is the one which appeared in film and book “Doctor No” by Ian Fleming.

From http://www.33rdinfantrydivision.org/archi... — From http://www.33rdinfantrydivision.org/archivesphotos/may5_flamethrower.jpg source information from 33rdinfantrydivision.org : S/Sgt Bill Seklscki fires a flame thrower at a Japanese position near Manacag, Luzon, P.I. Jan 25 1945. Photo: National Archives. Webmaster note: 33rd did not land on Luzon until Feb 1945. Date of picture could be a mistake. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In the book and film James Bond is sent to Crab Key to investigate Doctor No. Rumours abound about the “dragon” which roams the island, deterring anyone from visiting. In the end the fire breathing dragon turns out to be a vehicle fitted with a flamethrower. This goes to show that while fictional and mythical dragons may be common, real dragons are scarcer than hen’s teeth.

The Search for the Fundamental

Motion of gas molecules Español: Animación mos... — Motion of gas molecules Español: Animación mostrando la agitación térmica de un gas. Cinco partículas han sido coloreadas de rojo para facilitar el seguimiento de sus movimientos. Русский: Хаотическое тепловое движение на плоскости частиц газа таких как атомы и молекулы (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When does it stop? This screen that I am looking at, the keyboard that I am typing on, the invisible air between my eyes and the screen, even my body, all are composed of atoms, I told and believe. Apart from atoms, all there is is radiation, of various sorts.

The ancient Greek philosophers didn’t know about atoms so proposed various theories, which today seem quaint, but eventually they came around to atomism, and abandoned the other theories. In particular the theory of the four classical elements, earth, fire, water and air was dropped.

As I said, the theory now sounds quaint, but, given that the ancient Greek philosophers were not of an experimental frame of mind, the four classical elements could explain much of what could be observed. Everything could have been a mixture of these elements in various proportions.

After all, it appeared to work for colours – all colours that can be displayed on a computer screen can be specified in terms of the amount of the three primary colours of red, green and blue that a single pixel or dot on the screen emits. Why shouldn’t this scheme work for other things than light?

However Greek philosophers (and of course, philosophers in other cultures) noticed that, while some things could be broken down into component parts – sugar could be melted and burned, water could be driven off to leave the salts behind, and more importantly alcohol could be evaporated off and collected to make spirits, some things could not be broken down.

Gold, sulphur and phosphorus stubbornly refused to separate into earth, air, water or fire. Of course such stubbornness could be explained by the classical element theory – after all some things are easier to break down than others, but the Greeks eventually dropped the theory in favour of atomism. (This and what follows is highly simplified and condensed).

(Click here for rotating model) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This is the belief that everything is made up of small indivisible particles which differ from element to element. The lump of gold contains billions of gold atoms, while the sulphur block contains sulphur atoms.

From about the start of the scientific revolution, people started to work out the rules of chemistry, and the ‘why’ of chemical reactions. Why did carbon in coal burn away and leave an ash? We know that the carbon in the coal burns using the oxygen in the air and creates oxides of carbon which are gasses and not easily detectable, but the experiments which led to this knowledge were preformed in the era of the scientific revolution.



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So, matter is composed of atoms. That seemed to be the end of the story, as the vast majority of chemical experiments could be explained in terms of atoms, but exactly why atom A reacts in fixed proportions with atom B, but won’t have a bar of atom C. These relationships were noted but not really explained.

By the middle of the 19th century scientists began to detect problems with the “atoms as billiard balls” model. Electrons were discovered and soon related to chemistry, answering the above question. The new model, “atoms as small planetary-like systems”, had a small positively charged, and solid nucleus surrounded by a swarm of negatively charged electrons, with the electrons taking a major role in determining the chemistry of the atom.



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It was discovered that many elements behaved as if each atoms of the element weighed the same, but some elements broke this rule. The gas Chlorine for example has an atomic weight of 35.45. In other words each atom weighed about 35 and half times as much as a Hydrogen atom.

It was eventually discovered that not all Chlorine atoms weighed the same. Most had an atomic weight of 35 but some (about half) had a weight of 36. To cut a long story short it was discovered that the supposedly solid nucleus was composed of a collection of other particles called protons and neutrons.

While the number of protons and electrons determine the chemistry of an atom almost completely, the number of neutrons contribute mass to the atom and barely affect the chemistry.

While electrons appear to be truly fundamental particles and cannot be broken down further, the protons and neutrons are composed of particles called quarks. For reasons mentioned in the Wikipedia article quarks cannot be found in isolation, but are only found in other particles.

In addition to protons and neutrons, quarks make up other sub-atomic particles such as mesons. Scientists have discovered or postulated bosons which are particles that bind quarks and other fundamental particles together. From then on, things get complicated!

I haven’t mentioned the photon, which is bosonic, or the neutrino which is a fermion. All fundamental particles fit into one of these two families, and all sub-atomic interactions are the result of the rather incestuous exchange of these particles in their various groups and a strict set of rules. So far so good.

English: Enrico Fermi (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

However, there are still questions to be answered. Are these particles truly fundamental or do they have components, which may or may not be particles in the classical sense? What are the sizes of these particles, if such a concept is appropriate at this level? Have we found them all? What about dark matter?

Scientists have abandoned the first question. They don’t generally refer to particles as fundamental. They have seen a long list of fundamental particles turn out to be not so fundamental after all.



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Sizes of the particles may not make sense at the particle level, but the various theories may indicate sizes for some of them. There are difficulties over the size of the electron for instance. If it were a point object rather than having something that equates to size, then that causes difficulties with some theories.

As for the third and fourth questions, it appears that scientists may have found all the particles that explain ordinary matter, but naturally cautious, they don’t rule out other forms of matter such as the so called “dark matter” and “dark energy“. Dark matter and dark energy apparently interact with gravity and (from the Wikipedia article) and the Weak Nuclear Interaction.

My original question was “When does it stop?” By this I meant, which particles are truly fundamental and which have components that determine their properties? This question remains open, but if you have followed through my exposition, you will probably see that this is a question without an easy answer.



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Mainframes were different

IBM System 360/65 Operator's Panel The IBM Sys... — IBM System 360/65 Operator’s Panel The IBM System/360 Model 65 first shipped in 1966 This photo was taken by Mike Ross of corestore.org . He has given permission via email “Feel free to make use of … my pictures under the GNU license. All I ask is that they are credited & linked…”. –agr 19:07, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Mainframes were … different. Today we have devices that have orders of magnitude more processing power than the old mainframes. The old mainframes were big machines that performed business tasks for large organisations and that cost millions of dollars. The phone in your pocket shows you your email, let’s you Facebook or tweet your friends where ever you might be and what ever you might be doing. You can even use it to phone people!

Arguably we fritter away most of the enormous amount of processing power and storage that our hand held devices provide. We watch videos on them, yes, even porn, and play endless silly games on them. And cats. Cats have taken over the Internet and thereby our connected devices.

The fundamental concept of the mainframe is one single powerful(!) computer with all devices, such as card readers, terminals (screen and keyboard, no mouse), printers, tape units and other devices, more or less directly and permanently connected to the computer.

Interestingly, when you typed something into a terminal using the keyboard, it wasn’t sent immediately to the mainframe but was recorded in a buffer in the terminal. When one of a number of keys was hit the whole buffer was sent to the mainframe. These special keys were “Return”, which is similar to the “Enter” key, a “PF Key”, which is similar to a function key, and a few others.

This meant that you could type and edit stuff at your terminal and it would only be sent when you were finished. That is different from the model used by PCs and other modern devices, where every single key press that occurs is sent to the target computer, including typos and correction to typos.

Of course, when you press a key on your PC keyboard, the computer that is the target is the one that the keyboard is connected to, and what you type in goes into a buffer, but the principle still applies. The effect is more obvious if a lot of people are connected to a multi-user computer and are using it heavily, when the response to hitting a key takes a second or so to echo back to the screen.



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Multi-user computers are not common these days as they are not trivial to set up, and computers and networks have become so fast that it is generally easier to change the model and access applications over the network rather than use the direct connect model that was used in the early days.

A lot of the features of modern computing devices originated in mainframes. Mainframes originally ran one job or task at a time, but soon they became powerful enough to run many jobs at the same time. Mainframe operating systems were soon written to take advantage of this ability, but to achieve the ability to run multiple jobs, the operating systems had to be able to “park” a running job while another job got a slice of the processor.

To do that the operating system had to save the state of the process, especially the memory usage. This was cleverly achieved by virtualising memory usage – the job or task would think that it was accessing this bit of memory but the memory manager would make it use that bit of memory instead. The job or task didn’t know.

For instance the job or task might try to read memory location #ff00b0d0 (don’t worry about what this means) and the memory manager would serve up #ffccbod0 instead. Then a moment of so later another job or task might try to read that memory location. It would expect to find its own data there not the first task’s data, and the memory manager would this time serve up, say, #ffbbb0d0.

SVG Graph Illustrating Amdahl's Law — SVG Graph Illustrating Amdahl’s Law (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The key point is that the two tasks or jobs access the same address, but the address is not real, it is what is known as a virtual address, and the memory manager directs the request to different real addresses. This allows all sorts of cunning wheezes – a job or task can address more memory than the machine has installed and memory locations that have not been used in a while can be copied out to disk storage allowing the tasks in the machine to collectively use more memory than physically exists!

Exactly the same thing happens in your phone, your tablet, or your PC. Many tasks are running at the same time, using memory and processors as if these resources were dedicated to all the tasks. (Actually not all tasks are running at the same time – only as many tasks as there are processors in the processor chip can be running at the same time, but the processors are switched between task so fast it appears as if they are. The same is also true of mainframes).

Of course, there’s a downside to the mainframe model and that is that if the mainframe goes down, everyone is affected. In the early days of the PC era, every PC was independent and if it went down (which they often did) only one or two people, those who actually used the computer were directly affected. So if the Payroll computer crashed it didn’t affect Human Resources.

Soon though the ability to connect all the computers over a network became possible and computing once again became centralised. Things have changed, but the corporate server or servers now fulfil the role that once belonged to the mainframe.



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All the advantages of centralisation have been realised again. Technical facets of the operation of computers have been removed from those whose job was not primarily computing, much to the relief of most them I’d suspect. Backups and technical updates are performed by those whose expertise is in those fields, rather than by reluctant amateurs in the field.

However, the downside is that a centralised computing facility is never as flexible as the end users would like it to be and, somewhat ironically, that as an outage of the old mainframe used to affect many people, so will an outage of a server or servers in the current milieu.

Ganglia report showing editing outage, when Wi... — Ganglia report showing editing outage, when Wikipedia server srv156 stopped responding (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Too Much Sweetness

Sugar is a the name given by chemists to a family of compounds comprised of Carbon, Hydrogen and Oxygen in various configurations. Generally there are the same number of Carbon and Oxygen atoms and twice as many Hydrogen atoms, but this is not always true.

So far as I know all living things contain sugars, which supply the body with energy through a complex series of chemical reactions which function to slow down the release of energy from the sugar, which would otherwise be released in an unusable burst of energy.

The end result of these reactions is the release of water and carbon dioxide. The cycle of reactions needs as many Oxygen molecules as there are sugar molecules, more or less, assuming the the sugar is fully broken down, and that is why all living things need to take in Oxygen and why we breath out carbon dioxide.

We don’t normally notice the sugar that we take into our bodies as it is largely contained in the foods that we eat. With the exception of the sugar in our tea and that we may scatter on our cereals, it is invisible to us. We actually take in a lot of sugar when we eat things.

In fact we are told that we take in far too much sugar in a modern diet. People drink tea and coffee with sugar, or drink copious amounts of sugar filled soft drinks and we know that this is bad for us. It rots our teeth and makes us fat. It predisposes us to diabetes and other metabolic problems.

The reason that it makes us fat is because early humans (and other animals) had a life which saw feasts and famines as the food supply fluctuated. The body evolved to take advantage of the feast phases by storing energy for the famine times by converting the excess sugars that were ingested to fat. Fat is harder to break down to release its stored energy, and the body preferentially uses any sugars circulating in the body (in the form of glucose).

The aldehyde form of glucose (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As a species we have a taste for sugar. The body wants to take in as much as it can, in order to keep itself running, and to store up energy as fat for the lean times. However, these days, there are rarely any truly lean times for most people, so they take in more sugars than they need and store it as fat.

There is debate sometimes as to whether or not our desire for sugar amounts to an addition. Personally I don’t feel that it is truly an addiction, just a very strong desire to eat as much sugar containing food as possible. People don’t suffer intense reaction to the withdrawal of sugar from their diet as they would if it were an addition.

Generally they don’t suffer hallucinations, pains, or other mental or physical symptoms. Quite often they even feel better. Quite often they lose weight. Diabetes symptoms may abate, they may sleep better, and other physical problems may disappear.

It seems a no brainer that we should reduce the amount of sugar that we consume in our food and drink, yet we continue to consume it to excess. In my opinion there are at least three reasons for this.

Firstly, the body itself makes us crave sugary foods, as it has evolved to make us feel pleasure when eating something that it can use for fuel and additionally store up for the leaner times that never come. We are predisposed to like sweet things, and our experience tells us that a chocolate bar is sweet.

Secondly, we have been given sweet things as a treat from the time that we are small, and we expect our treats to be sweet. In a restaurant the main course is about protein, usually with some meat or other as the star, but desserts are treats and therefore must be loaded with sugar.

Thirdly, it is absurdly easy to obtain sugar these days. The confectionery aisle of the supermarket has the most shelf space. Cakes and desserts take up shelves of their own, as do soft drinks which are laced with sugar.

That’s a big issue. Everything has sugar in it these days. In the past there was sugar in many things, but I believe that the quantity of sugar was lower. These days there is a large slug of sugar in almost everything.



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It’s even crept into the main course. Glazes and marinades have always had sugar in them as the sugar caramelises on the meat as it cooks, and gives it a nice colour, but many pouring sauces and dressings also contain copious amounts of sugar. Even the humble meat pie contains sugar or so I heard. Something to do with giving the right consistency to the gravy, I believe. So what was wrong with the original ways of thickening it?

This has all led to an issue, so far as I am concerned. I can see all the health benefits of reducing one’s intake of sugar, but so far as others are concerned their bodies are their own responsibility. If they wish to make themselves fat and ill, that is up to them.

English: This is a graph showing the rate of o... — English: This is a graph showing the rate of obesity in adults and the rate of being overweight in both children and adults in the United States from 1960 – 2004. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

What really annoys me about the sugar in everything trend is that almost everything tastes of sugar! I gave up sugar in tea many decades ago, and I didn’t miss it, but now I hate the taste of tea with sugar in it. I can’t drink it. I also gave up sugar on my morning cereal, which was harder, but I now don’t miss it. There’s already some sugar in it of course so why add more?

But everything else? Everything that you touch at the supermarket is laced with sugar, from the white stuff they call bread to the pickles and sauces you put in your sandwich. As a result, you can’t taste much of anything under the overpowering sweet taste.

Someone once commented when I complained about the overbearing sweet taste of everything, that I could just make my own. That’s fine, and I do do it as much as I can, but it’s not always possible, as the ingredients may already contain sugar, and sometimes i just wants the convenience of picking something off the shelf.

English: Organically produced blackstrap molas... — English: Organically produced blackstrap molasses produced in Paraguay. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Thus it was written….

1976 The beginning of flexible computing in pu... — 1976 The beginning of flexible computing in public health. Auditorium A at CDC, converted to a war room for the Swine Flu crisis, is filled with epidemiologists and a Digital Equipment PDP 11 minicomputer the size of a refrigerator. A program called SOCRATES, written in FORTRAN by programmer Rick Curtis, allowed an epidemiologist to define questions, enter data, and summarize the results in tabular form without the aid of a programmer. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Have you ever noticed that a computer program never does exactly what you want? Oh, it will process your data for you, and produce results that you can use, or it will move those files from here to here, but may move ones that you didn’t want moving or leave ones that you did want to move. But it won’t do exactly what you want, first time with no hassles.

Of course you can make it work for you, make it do what you want more accurately, but you have to work harder to make it do so, and programs are supposed to make things easier, right? Take this very editor that I am using to compose this post. I thought the bold words above as I wrote, but I needed to perform an action to make them come out bold and another to ensure that the text after the bold words didn’t also come out bold.

JWPce is a Japanese Word Processor, this softw... — JWPce is a Japanese Word Processor, this software is under GNU license. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Of course this is a very minor consideration and if I were to find a program that changed the font to bold for one word and then stopped, I’d probably find it irksome to bold two words in succession. Also, I’d bet the house that there would be something that the first program did automatically or easily that would be difficult to achieve using the second program.

Those who are not programmers seem to have an ambivalent attitude to programs. On the one hand, if they are using a program and they can’t get it to work, they blame themselves. “I must be doing something wrong!” comes the impassioned plea. So the technophile in the household has to interpret what helpful statement “It doesn’t work!” really means and what how the program expects in the way of input. Problem fixed. Until the next time.

On the other hand, the non-programmer will accept it without question when the hero/heroine of the film briefly types something at the computer and the world is saved! Hooray! The sentient virus destroying humanity is defeated! Hooray again!

However these issues with programs are not bugs. The program is not doing something wrong. The issue is with our expectations of how things ought to work. It may well be that the program is designed to do things differently to those expectations, either because the programmer assumes that the way that he codes it is the way that people will expect things to work.



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If the programmer gets a lot of issues with a particular feature of his program, he may decide to change it to fit more closely with the expectations of the users, and then send out an update. It is likely that he will then get a lot of issues from those people who have been using the program for a while and have come to expect it to behave the old way. The programmer can never win.

I’ve done quite a bit of programming over the years, thankfully mostly for myself. Every program that is written these days usually fits into what might be called an ecosystem. There are programs to gather data, programs to crunch data, and programs to display the results, but there are many programs to perform each of these three tasks.

For example, the results may be printed on a printer, either as a table of data, or as graph or pie chart, or in these days of 3-D printing, a physical object, or it may be displayed on a screen, or in any other way where the recipient can interrelate with it.

Data input may typed in, drawn in on a graphical input device, or it may be collected by some means or other from sensors or other devices. Your heartbeat may be collected from a number of sensors on your skin, read by a machine and be printed off on a roll or paper, while at the same time being displayed on a local screen. It may also be sent off to some remote location where specialists may peruse it.

In the middle, between input and output comes the processing or crunching of the data. This is what most people think of when they think of computer processing. Somewhat unfairly the input and output processes are relegated to only secondary interest. This is, however, what a program or system is written to do. Even so, input and output processes may be complex.

Data may be processed in several different ways in between input and output, and by several different programs. There are layers within layers. For example a program that takes advantage of a database uses many layers. The program which the programmer is writing will no doubt call programs (called APIs or interfaces) within the environment that he is working in which start the process of communicating with the database.

The API puts the programmers request into a form that the database expects and sends it to another process, not usually part of the programmer’s chosen system, which exists only to connect the programmer’s program (and any other similar programs) to the database.

At the database end the receiving part of the database system receives the request and passes it to the main database program, which checks it and executes it. During the execution process the database program makes calls to system programs which perform any necessary retrieval or writing of the data to the system’s file system, via the system’s hardware interface with the storage system.



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I’ve collapsed many layers in the explanation above. The main point is that the programmer’s program is the tip of the iceberg, and there are many layers which are called into action during the execution of the program. To complicate things further, the system that the programmer uses to perform his work is also a program and has its own layers on top of layers.

This explains why programs don’t ever do exactly what you want. The programmer has to use utility programs which, while flexible can’t do everything. The utility programs are also flexible, but are interfacing with other programs, which while flexible also can’t do everything. And so on.

English: TM-database (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The more flexible a program is, the bigger it is, as it has be programmed to enable the flexibility. So, this forces constraints on it, which impose constraints on the programmer, whose program therefore imposes constraints on the user of the program. And those constraints are why the program can’t do exactly what you want, but usually, it’s close enough that the program is useful to the end user. Most of the time.