Progress?

Almost everyone is familiar with Moore's law: The number of transistors that can fit on the same size chip will double every two years. This has meant exponential growth in electronics as now we're dealing with some pretty big numbers, and doubling them creates numbers that require scientific notation because you lose your place in the zeroes following the 1.

Another application of this concept is in our ability to make war. According to P.W. Singer in his book Wired for War a Greek hoplite and 500 of his buddies could just about cover the area of a football field in antiquity. A commander could see his entire army along with the army of the enemy from a good vantage point. By the Civil War our weapons and methods had improved to the point where on twenty men could control the same area. By World War I weapon lethality was at the point that we could kill people we couldn't even see. Two soldiers with a machine gun could control the field. By World War II a single infantryman would be responsible for an area the size of five football fields. In 2008, in Iraq the territory for a single soldier was 780 football fields.

Air war has seen even greater exponential growth. In World War I, the pilots who mostly flew reconnaissance missions would occasionally drop a homemade bomb or hand grenade. On rare occasions it was effective. The entire air force never successfully neutralized a single target without infantry. By World War II we could actually take out a target with 108 planes. In 2008 Afghanistan, the average sortie of one aircraft destroys 4.07 targets. Many of those aircraft are flown by someone sitting in a single wide near Las Vegas.

There is also another sensitivity that has changed. In antiquity the bards reveled in the heroic deaths of the thousands and thousands, who at that time constituted a much larger percent of the population. Civilians were not customarily killed in battle. The losing side were just enslaved, ravished and systematically put to death or sacrificed by the victor. In the Civil War, 30,000 could die in a battle. Civilians might sit in a good spot to catch all the action. Sherman realized the only way to stop the Confederacy was to their supplies and sometimes their suppliers.  The First World War saw the death of millions and introduction of the term "collateral damage". Again in the Second World War millions died and the perpetration of civilian casualties was prosecuted by both sides as part of their overall strategy. The First Gulf War introduced a new concept: War where none of the "good guys" died in battle. Today, we go to great lengths to make sure the caskets coming home cannot be seen by camera crews. It took years for as many soldiers to perish in battle as civilians perished in the Twin Towers.

Writing this brought up a few realizations:

1. We value efficiency creating both life and death.
2. We continue to use sports in our analogies of war. Maybe this is because so many games came from training exercises for warriors and hunters. I can't think of a peaceful application of throwing a javelin. Somehow, seeing "no man's land" and "ground zero" as a football field makes it all seem less hostile.
3. There really are no "innocent" civilians any more. The Afghans supply the Taliban, our taxes and grandchildren's debt supply our military and mercenary.
4. The Predator drone seems like an effective response to the suicide bomber.
5. I had better say my prayers every night, because all it takes is a few empowered people having a bad day to create the post homo sapiens period of earth's history.

Zeroes and III's

Zeroes and I’s

In elementary school I gained a basic understanding of how Roman Numerals worked. Like many (I think) I struggled to convert the production date of a movie shown in the credits (always shown in Roman Numerals in my youth) to the Gregorian Calendar before it disappeared from the screen. I got better as I picked up that everything started with MCM (1900) and all I really had to negotiate were the L's, X's, V's and I's. I quickly realized in third grade math (Mrs. Brown, Memorial School, Medfield, Ma) that doing basic arithmetic with Roman Numerals was fairly difficult; there was not logical flow using the position of the numeral as there is in the Arabic system: the ones place, the tens place, and so on (unless this is base 8). For example if you change CLIV to XLIV there is not logical progression. In CLIV the C means 100 more than L which means 50. The I mysteriously subtracts 1 from V which is 5 = 154. Swap the IV to VI and a change that would be monumental in the "tens" place but only gives us two more = 156. In other words, if the numeral before another numeral is less than it, we subtract it from the numeral on the right, if it is greater we add it. Replacing the C with an X in the fourth column (using right to left math standards) 154 becomes 44. Now we understand why the abacus is such a great step forward.

What we call “Arabic” numbers are really Hindu-Arabic, and in early Eurasian civilization, the Indians led the way in math. They even came up with a symbol to indicate nothing, the zero (0) around the seventh century CE. This caused the Romans to dig their feet in with CLIV. Certainly the expression of a quantity of nothing is a contradiction. How can you have a nothing? The Catholic Church decided this was certainly a satanic invention and outlawed its use. About a millennia later the Europeans must have decided they had enough as the zero and the use of Hindu-Arabic numbers won the argument. Today the zero sits proudly between -1 and +1.

What I was not taught was that the Spanish conquistadors encountered a symbol for zero when they arrived in the Americas. The may not have really known this as the Church also decided everything written in the Americas was also a product of Satan and systematically destroyed everything they could. In 1993 an archeologist looking over a stela finally came up with sufficient verbiage to allow linguists to interpret some of the early writing. These civilizations used three calendars, the “Long Count” which counts the days from a fixed date in the past, a sacred “Tzolkin” of 260 days and the secular “Haab” of 365 days. Since these calendars don’t drop a year at the birth of Christ (year 0), they were suitable for astronomical study. The Long Count worked something like IP addresses where each group of numbers meant something different. The remarkable thing is that the stela are inscribed with Long Count dates where zero is used as a place holder as early as 125 CE. It was definitely in common use by the third century CE, at least four hundred years before its invention in the old world.

The Myth of "The Empty Continents"

I've been reading the book 1491 and 1493 by Charles Mann. The indicate great scholarly study in research. Footnotes are excellent and do not seem to have been selectively quoted or included.

I had always known that the effects of European disease on the natives of the Americas were tremendous. What I hadn't realized is how tremendous.

We tend to cringe at the devastation of the bubonic plague in Europe. Generally, 1/3 of the population, 33 of every 100 people were killed in the first wave. The second wave claimed more lives.

European pathogens preceded colonists by about 5 years. An area would be "discovered", mapped and minimally explored. Europeans had been fishing off the east coast of North America for years. Animals that were brought, especially pigs, escaped and carried trans-specific diseases with them (most animal pathogens are not necessarily dangerous to humans, but pigs in particular are a great source of trans-specific infection). Just considering smallpox and malaria millions died from exposure. It seems that native immune systems were extremely susceptible to bacterial and viral infections, but held up much better than Europeans for parasite infection.

The story of Tisquantum (we teach his name as Squanto, but in American History, but that was derogatory nickname given by Massasoit) can illustrate what happened. When he was originally kidnapped and enslaved, Europeans described the coastline as a continuous blaze of camp fires. He was from the Patuxet area (now Rhode Island). At some point, he was able to get transported back with a fishing trip as far as Newfoundland, but wouldn't venture over land for fear of the huge population of unfriendly tribes. The captain was unwilling to sail further south and risk poorer weather on the North Atlantic. Five years later, when he was able to return to Newfoundland again, he decided to take his chances. Where there once had been villages a series of camps, villages and structures that were empty. Great funeral mounds and piles of skeletons were everywhere. Many were left laying down where they awaited their last minutes. Recent art showed people with huge sores all over their bodies, characteristic of smallpox.

It is estimated now that as much as 95% of inhabitants of the Americas were killed by European disease. Coastal natives had moved inland to escape the death, carrying the pathogens with them. In a great many places 100% of the population was killed. Similar histories were written about the Aztecs and the Inca, but are only recently being mentioned if taught at all. The Spanish and English colonists viewed this as God's statement that the Americas were destined to become the property of the Europeans.

In the saga of Guns, Germs and Steel it is the germs that were most powerful and devastating.   Imagine a life where in five years 95% or your family, your friends and your neighbors died a horrible, unstoppable death. 95%.

Bro Tox

Dr. Alan Scott may be the model of the a doctor searching to cure a problem that has plagued the world since creation. He wanted to find a way to treat strabismus which most of us call "crossed eyes". The effect of this more than cancels out the benefits of stereoscopic vision. Society has also tended to mock and demean people with this malady.

In 1980 he found the cure and it was licensed for medicinal use. Produced by the bacteria Clostridium botulinum, botulinum toxin acts a neurotoxin causing a temporary paralysis of the muscles the affected nerves control. This turned out to have a hidden dividend: Botox was also effective at treating certain kinds of tension migraines, giving sufferers back their lives.


All medications come with side effects. Without the stimulation of the nerves treated with Botox, the muscles could no longer contract. The result is that those wrinkles we all acquire as time goes on disappear for a few months until the effects of the Botox wear off. If you Google Botox you will probably see the name of Dr. Jean Caruthers, not the name of Dr. Scott. Dr. Caruthers is credited as being the first person to use Botox for cosmetic purposes.


We live in a world where we constantly declare that "it's what is inside you, not your outsides that is important." We don't really believe this, because if we did we would not spend the money to poison (toxin means poison) ourselves just to lose a few wrinkles. We would also spend our money to enjoy the work of actresses like Meryl Streep. She refuses to Botox so we writer her off as "past her prime" and only suited for "older roles". Her acting is still magnificent. But you will note the number of celebrities and even our everyday friends that invest in Botox to appear younger than we are.


As an aside, I don't understand how a true actor, who uses their face as a tool with enormous impact, can justify paralyzing it. Gone are the little nuances of tension in an eye wink, a raised eyebrow or a concerned forehead. The term for this is "frozen face" and due to the lack of skill of many cosmetic doctors, you can see it everywhere.


It is not just women using Botox, as we still tend to give inordinate priority to their beauty missing much of their other contributions. Men, too, are into the Botox party. It even has its own moniker, "Bro Tox".


Dr. Scott sold the patent on Botox to Allergan for $8 million. Most people laugh at his business ineptitude. His response that I read was, "I already have everything I want with $8 million, what would I do with more?" Allergan has the answer: Make people aware of the terrible effects wrinkles can have on who you are, then sell you something you can buy again, and again, and again....

The Shroud of Turin

Almost everyone knows the story of the Shroud of Turin. I, for one, am incredibly skeptical about any "holy relics". I have to agree with Mark Twain who said "If you took all the splinters I've seen that claiming to be from the true cross, you could build a city." My standard feeling about "holy relics" is "And...?".  I don't think Christ's cup would have any more influence over what you might drink than Ronald Reagan's pen would influence what you might write. Maybe I should compare Hemingway's Remington.

Generally it is accepted that the fabric may be too young, carbon dating from around 1350 CE, but that the pollen and other biological markers found on are definitely from Jerusalem and the chronicled path of the shroud. The weaving of the fabric is consistent with first century Hebrew manufacture. In other words, the consensus appears to be "We're pretty sure from one scientific test that this isn't real, but a lot of other scientific tests support it to be genuine."

One fact that is not contested is that the fabric made a fantastic negative for the photographs taken in the last century. The detail is remarkable. The point made Easter Morning on CBS Sunday Morning  by a researcher, Thomas De Wesselow, describing himself as "an agnostic, maybe a skeptic" is that his book has determined that everything on the shroud is absolutely consistent with the method of Roman crucifixion in the first century. Almost all of the paintings created to depict this event are NOT accurate, i.e., they do not depict the crucifixion in the way it was executed. Accepting the carbon dating, my first questions start with, "Who did they crucify in 1350 following exactly the Roman methods and the biblical account to create this hoax? And who was it that traveled the chronicled route of the shroud collecting pollen and other biological determinants to make sure they would later be found on the fabric?"

Then came a theory I had never heard before: The sightings of Jesus after the resurrection were not sightings of his immortal body, but sightings of the shroud. What Mary of Magdalene saw and talked with in the garden was the shroud. What Paul came upon on the road to Damascus was the shroud. The entity that baptized the disciples with the Holy Spirit was the shroud.

I guess if you start from a supposition fraught with superstitious beliefs of miracle-producing relics, it is not a difficult reach to shrouds that walk, talk, bless, eat and invite the touch of a doubting Thomas.  For my part, it is easier to conceive of a god reassuming his perfected body than it is to accept animated fabric. And I have to ask this question, "How did they prepare and feed the fish to the shroud?"

Something I Learned Today

I try to learn something new every day. This is not difficult as the number of things I don't know is infinitesimal (like I just learned how to spell infinitesimal). The hard part is realizing what you learned. Then comes the difficult task of remembering what your learned (this is becoming increasingly difficult as my birthdays pile up). Then comes the real challenge, applying what you've learned in a beneficial way.

My definition of  "evil" includes the use of knowledge for a selfish or destructive purpose. Next to that is the definition of "folly" which includes using knowledge to do anything that just shouldn't be done. The flip side of that is NOT using knowledge to do what SHOULD be done. This can be more difficult because many of us struggle to find the internal motivation and insight to perceive what needs to be done.

For this blog, these will be my definitions of other words:

1. Wisdom is the beneficent application of knowledge.
2. Smart is realizing what knowledge is needed.
3. Intelligence is the ability to gain that knowledge and greater intelligence is gaining that intelligence is the most painless and efficient way.

My goal is to put something here frequently enough that the word "Today" in the title has some kind of significance. It might need to evolve into "This Week", "This Month" or worse. This would not be caused by spilling over the shores of my reservoir of knowledge, but by my mental pareses and a lack of self-discipline.

I'm publishing this blog, not to show the world what I know, but what I DON'T know. I love to learn which is why I have a life of incredible joy. This, to me, is like wanting you dinner partner to sample the exquisite dessert on your plate instead of hoping she doesn't notice it before you finish it. Think of Lehi and fruit. I just hope that I can digest the fruit properly.

As always, I'm interested in feedback from those that might come upon these words. Please share your dessert with me. I'm always looking for something I have never tasted before!