Israel

Recently, Hamas, an organization that is constituted of the most anti-Israel members of the Palestinian population, launched an attack on Israeli civilians—on October 7th—which involved killing many Israeli civilians, and kidnapping hundreds more, and taking them into Gaza.

Immediately, Israeli forces retaliated by launching massive counter-attacks, which killed thousands of Palestinian civilians, including hospitals. 

While responding to these attacks, Americans—people living in the USA—have condemned the Israeli military, and those who have condemned the Israeli military action are being labeled "antisemites", and those who condemn the Hamas attack are being labeled "anti-palastinian", and so on and so forth.  The anger of all parties is increasing, and it's all exacerbated by the vagueness of the terms antisemite, zionist, accusations wanting to eliminate Israel, wanting to eliminate the Palestinian people, and similar motives.

Responding to each accusation is difficult, because as outsiders, with little knowledge of the facts, shooting from the hip we're more than likely to say the wrong thing.  Confusion helps Hamas, who clearly hoped that the world population would take one side or another, and thus infuriate either moslems worldwide, or jews worldwide, and certainly US jews, who are powerful in the US.  The Hamas attack was clearly planned to cause anger everywhere.  But Hamas, though it consists of Palestinians, does not speak for all Palestinians, nor do Palestinians have a means of controlling Hamas.

I urge my readers not to take sides on the issue of who is at fault in this conflict, except that Hamas—but not the entire Palestinian population!—is culpable for triggering off the hostilities. 

There's plenty of blame to go around. Palestinians are continually singer to Jewish homesteaders driving them off their properties and setting up their own farms in their places.  Palestinians are forced to live in poverty, in ghettos.  No doubt, Palestinians would have briefly rejoiced in the Hamas attack, but would have known that it would only result in massive retaliation.  But Hamas does not care; they want all out war, and they want the entire middle east to be involved.  (I don't know this; I'm just guessing.)  But taking sides does not help the situation.  I don't think taking sides is required here.  The only intelligent thing to do is to say that it's too complicated to take a side. 

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Lights!

Well, today Katie decided it was the best day to put up decorative Christmas-type lights!  Two of my close friends died, but I guess these sorts of decorations should not be left undone for the sake of mourning. 

It hasn't been long since holiday decoration lights ate up a lot of electricity over the holiday season, and I cringed every year, thinking about the waste of energy.  But the tiny LED lights we have draw a fraction of the power their predecessors did, so I make sure I'm not being watched by the energy police, and help Katie hang up the lights.

Even when I was still teaching, I encouraged the student club to decorate a large lobby with an artificial tree that was visible from outside the school building, so students who have known me have cause to class me with the decorative light maniacs on our street.  (Whatever the season: Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, the lights blast out.  Of course Spring Lane in South Williamsport has us all beaten.)

The time will come, though, when we shall have to desist from unrestrained electrical splurging.  There will probably be multi-national pacts to say that we're going to cut down inessential use of energy by a specified amount each year, and using fewer Christmas lights will be a painless way to do it. 

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I'm Going to Write a Cookbook!

This isn't a new idea for me; over the years I've made numerous starts on one, but never continued with them. 

I want to write a cookbook for people—mainly guys—who have never cooked before.  (I know there are a whole lot of lazy bums out there who want to steal my idea—which isn't even original—but I'm going to hire a witch doctor to put a charm on the thing, so that any plagiarism will get sores on their butts, and will never be able to sit down.)  Incidentally, there is a website that specializes in instruction about how to do numerous things you've never tried before; it's called wikihow.  Unfortunately, every time someone writes in a new post, a team of improvers jumps on the thing and ruins the article.  I used to be on there, so I know. 😞

Intelligence, and Schooling

Have you noticed how bright people are often easily bored?

Well, there are lots of problems with this statement, one of which is that there really isn't an (1) objective, (2) reliable and consistent, and (3) useful way of measuring intelligence; until such a thing is discovered, we're going to have arguments about what it is.

That doesn't mean we can't make statements about intelligence.  It just means that these statements are going to be challenged by lots of people, simply because their own intuitive understanding of intelligence is at odds with say, my understanding of it. 

One thing it could mean is the ability to absorb ideas.  For years we've come across people who can't conceive that we've succeeded in putting people on the moon.  There are lots of problems here; their concept of what the moon is, their understanding of basic science, their fear of the consequences of admitting that they (now) believe that it happened, and so on.  Of course, absorbing ideas is one thing; organizing them in one's mind to form a useful structure is quite another. 

Another concept that is often called intelligence is the ability to solve problems.  This is a very reasonable understanding of the word, related to the first idea. 

OK, my theory is that, because intelligent people often get bored, one of the things we have to do—the family, their social group, society as a whole—is to teach them some options for how to keep themselves amused and entertained.  And I believe the function of education is exactly this.

Now, seeing how education has to be a communal activity, and seeing how communal activity is usually organized politically, nobody who suggests a connection between education and entertainment is going to get any sort of approval.  In fact, judging from how hard school districts across the country are coming down on Art and Music, you can readily believe that the ordinary man in the street takes a completely Keep Art and Music Out of our Schools attitude about the matter.

But we need smart kids to be educated.  They need to be taught all the math and computer science and engineering they will need to join engineering companies, and airlines, and city planners, in order that our complicated lives will continue to function smoothly.  And we need them to be amused and entertained while they're doing it. 

While the country was mostly in shut- down mode during the pandemic, there were scores of citizens being bored out of their minds, and some of them taking it out on their children.  This is so sad; if only they knew ways of keeping their kids amused!  And why not amuse them in some educational way?  Sure, it isn't easy, but it is important.  Unfortunately many parents think that it wasn't their job to deal with the problem.  Well, of course it isn't, in some definitions of 'job'.  But we mustn't think of children as just some tiny nuisances that have very little to do with us, you know.  A kid who has been taught well in school and at home, can quickly snap into 'this sounds interesting' mode if dad or mom makes them sit down and listen. 

To be honest, though, it would have been a challenge to keep this up over weeks and months.  In future epidemics, city and state planners will, we hope, have ideas about how to manage being closed down without going crazy, but that's not something we can depend upon. 

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Toys

There are all sorts of people reading these blogs, and it's quite possible that some of them might feel picked on by this particular post.  On the other hand, some of them might feel a little validated. 

The main idea is that kids can—and I'm not saying they actually will—improvise toys with anything they find lying around the house.  A pile of sand; a dandelion, old broken equipment in the garage.  Your pets.  The furniture.  Clearly, some of this should not be accessible, being dangerous.  (But you can't protect them from every conceivable danger; one does one's best, and a clever infant can always find something that isn't safe to play with!)

This is not to say that you should never get them Legos, or building blocks, or little battery-powered keyboards.  The fact of the matter is you can never predict which sort of toy will grab the imagination of the kid.  Given that, just go with the flow. 

I'm known for being a pacifist.  I've never even been put in the position of having to make a decision about whether to bear arms.  When I was about 9 years old, I was given the gift of a toy machine gun for Christmas.  It just made a fake Tommy gun sound, and lights flashed inside.  My parents were confirmed pacifists also, but for some reason they let me play with this fake machine gun, until its batteries ran out.  But my favorite present that Christmas was a fountain-pen that wrote in purple, and not the machine-gun!  And so it goes.  I don't think any particular talent I have was sparked by any toy I was given. 

One toy I really wanted was a construction set.  My cousin had an advanced Meccano set, Meccano being a construction set company based in France.  But I never got one.  I just visited my cousin, and watched him make cranes, and elevators, and all sorts of amazing things with that Meccano set.  He did become a doctor.  But how did that toy influence his creativity?  Did it influence him at all?  We can't know.  There are so- called experts that will tell you that certain toys are great for certain things, but I doubt that they can say these things with certainty.  The only thing that I think really does have a bearing on encouraging the mental development of young children is the amount of time their adults (parents, cousins, uncles, aunts, older siblings) spend playing with them, up to a point.  Children who are left strictly alone all the time are less likely to develop as fast.  This opinion is just based on anecdotal evidence. 

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Roger Penrose Nails it Again

The James Webb Space Telescope

There's recently been a lot of excitement about the images coming in from the so-called JWST, the latest telescope sent out by NASA and the JPL, and commentators and geeky influencers are getting themselves excited with the possibility that the Big Bang Theory might be wrong!!  "Please, please, let it not be so!"  Don't panic; all future cosmological theories will (probably) incorporate some version of the Big Bang.

As I was watching, at long last, Roger Penrose on YouTube, I was startled for one big reason.  In grad school, where I studied all sorts of things (in contrast to a lot of my fellow-students, who were already focused on getting to the research stage ASAP,) my research group---OK, it was just me and my advisor---but he loosely belonged to the group that had collaborated with Roger Penrose and Ezra (Ted) Newman, Paul Todd, John Porter and co, to develop a technique based on complexification of Einstein's theory.

I never could see the point of complexification of spacetime.  I loved and was quite at home with Complex Analysis, the mathematics of complex numbers; they are an elegant and unifying approach to various aspects of math, but I had learned physics from a completely non-complex point of view, and I merely endured the idea of complexification, because I did not want to be rude, and I did not want to spend an age before I graduated.

A central idea with complex analysis is that of conformal transformation.  This term refers to transforming graphs (bear in mind that a lot of mathematics is about graphs) in such a way that lengths and distances may be distorted, but angles are preserved.  Einstein's equations can be transformed conformally as well.  (If you transform the geometry of a problem, you can transform the equations as well.  Sometimes the equations don't look anything like they used to; sometimes they are hardly changed at all.  In this case, the equations were the same except for a non-zero formula that could be divided out from both sides of each equation; what a stroke of luck.)

There is sure to be a print explanation of Penrose's idea on the Web somewhere, but here is the gist of it.

The Boundary of Spacetime

A favorite thing for Penrose and Newman---principally the latter---to do, was to reduce the infinite part of space into a surface.  This sort of thing has been done in many cases.  For instance, the Number Line (or the Real Line, as it is known to its friends) can be reduced to just a line segment with two endpoints.  The whole infinite part of the number line is collapsed---very carefully, obviously---to the two dots at the end of the line segment: minus infinity and plus infinity.

In the case of Spacetime, every point (or event) has to lie on a set of what are called null geodesics, that is, paths of light rays.  Now, in principle, light rays will leave every point in every direction.  We say that there is a sphere's worth of light rays emanating from each point.  Each of these, like the number line, can be reduced to a line segment, with two endpoints.  The clever part of the method is that all these endpoints can be formed into a surface.  Two surfaces, actually; one in the (infinite) past, and one in the infinite future.  The shrinking of spacetime is done conformally, so that the equations are transformed nicely.  So this was the basis of my dissertation, and for obvious reasons, I tried to keep it under wraps, because I was vaguely embarrassed by the whole thing.

Heat and Cold under Conformal Transformation

This is where matters stood, until I happened to watch Penrose explain his theory on YT.  The first point to note is that if a portion of space is compressed conformally, it becomes hot.  Secondly, if a portion of space is expanded, or stretched, it becomes cold.  Thirdly, Penrose pointed out, that if the physics of the so-called Big Bang Singularity is stretched out, it becomes quite smooth, and not a singularity at all.  (All this has to be proved, but Penrose has apparently demonstrated all this to the satisfaction of those who are interested.) 

Now here's the punchline.  Penrose says, if you take some sort of catastrophic event, like a supernova for instance, and follow its matter and its light rays all the way out to infinity---in our model, that means chasing it down until it hits the future boundary---we will see how it will appear from the distant future of the entire universe.  In fact, Penrose says, it will look very much like the images observed by the JWST as emanating from inside the Big Bang!  These sorts of phenomena, the reverse of a Big Bang, have been called a Big Slurp!

To join the dots, it's beginning to look like we're just one of a sequence of spacetimes, and the end of each spacetime is in fact the Big Bang of the next one in the sequence.

This is not a new idea; the model of a cyclic cosmology was one of those shown us in college, in baby relativity class.  I never dreamed that that theoretical concept would turn out to be something that astronomical observations would someday nudge us towards!

Apparently Some People Hate Education

The picture some analysts paint of those who have followed Trump ardently for the last decade or so, is of hardworking, conservative people, mostly rural, who do not like the educated elite.  They point out that college-educated people are everywhere, taking all the jobs, including the army and the police, everything. 

Well, this is true.  Businesses tend to hire college graduates, just to filter down their applications.  Then again, everything is getting more digital: even talking to your doctor goes through a computer, so having a college man or woman dealing with phone calls sort of makes a tiny bit of sense. 

Non college citizens are naturally resentful that they can hardly do anything easily, unlike in years gone by, and it looks like a plot just to make life harder for Trump followers. 

What's going to happen?  Are businesses going to stop investing in computer solutions to everything, just to make Trumpies happy?  I don't think so.  Many business owners are Trump conservatives, but they're not going to give up on the advantages of advanced technology.  And they're going to need techies to work the systems for them.  They might not be college - educated techies, though; they may have gone to 2- year colleges, where they can pick up the basics of what they need, to run the software and the hardware.  (Unfortunately, half- baked techies can really screw up big time.)

The population of anti- tech luddites has sort of leveled, but for some obscure reason, some immigrants and Latinos are joining their ranks, and we can only guess why.  (Perhaps they feel that the little education they have can go a long way with those who have no education at all.)

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