The Privacy Myth

No matter which side they're on, everyone is talking about the "revelation" that the National Security Agency has been collecting data about Americans' private communications. Aside from the clearly documented fact that we've known about this program since 2005 (it inspired my very first comedy video), I find it curious that many people are calling this an indefensible invasion of privacy -- a "draconian" program that is both unconstitutional and unethical.

I do not understand how anyone can reasonably expect privacy protection for their telephone metadata (phone numbers and identities of parties, and the duration of their calls, which is what the NSA has been collecting). I'm afraid it is not, as many claim, a violation of our Fourth Amendment rights: The 1979 Supreme Court case of Smith v. Maryland established that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy regarding telephone metadata. Today's suit by the ACLU therefore has no grounds and will be dismissed (which, fortunately, has never stopped them from trying before). So, there's that minor detail.

The notion of absolute or even relative privacy is a quaint relic from a bygone, pre-electronic era. How often is our cherished personal privacy routinely violated, in manners which we accept without the slightest protest? Let us count the ways:

1. Anytime you appear in public, you are photographed constantly by security cameras. As seen in the Boston Marathon bombings case, this video can be combined to track your movements with incredible accuracy, should anyone wish to do so.

2. If you have a cell phone and it's turned on, your real-time, minute-to-minute position can be similarly monitored and tracked with amazing accuracy. This technology, too, was used in the Boston case.

3. If you drive a car with an air bag system, a device under your hood constantly records your speed, acceleration, and braking actions. If you're in an accident, the data from this recorder can and will be used against you in a court of law.

4. If you own property, anyone with an internet connection can view photos of it, taken from several different angles, for free. Zillow.com will even overlay information about the size of the home and the most recent sale price.

5. For a nominal fee, anyone can perform a government- and/or credit-records search to reveal your home address (if that isn't already freely available), residence history, arrest record, credit score, business license, etc.

6. If you upload a photograph, the file can be analyzed to reveal the camera's serial number, and if the seller is subpoenaed, your identity as the photographer.

7. Any online photograph identifying you can be found in seconds, by anyone, as can any information that has ever been revealed about you online. It is virtually impossible to get such things removed.

8. If you touch something and invariably shed skin cells or hairs, your presence at the scene can later be confirmed with incredible certitude, through DNA sequencing.

9. Consumer data centers have compiled dossiers on you and your buying habits. (If you're turning 55 soon, you'll be hearing from the AARP. You can be sure of it.)

10. If you include the term "Game of Thrones" in your text on Gmail, you may well be targeted with a banner ad involving Game of Thrones. Yeah, your emails are being scanned by a corporate entity with zero oversight. Does that not bother you also, and if so, why do you still use Gmail?

11. If you live in certain cities (like mine) and you live in an apartment, you can be fined for lighting up a cigarette inside your own home. Now, if that isn't an affront to personal privacy and freedom -- an otherwise-legal act being outlawed in one's own home -- I don't know what is. Yet, the members of my community seem to think this is just fine. (I am neither a smoker nor an apartment dweller.)

12. Then of course there's the personal information that users of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc., are happy to distribute to the world. This self-invasiveness, in many cases, boggles the mind.

Through all of this, though, somehow there's an assumption that one's precious phone-calling records are sacrosanct. Where is this world, where we can expect to do anything and go anywhere we wish, using any technology, without leaving a trace? It's no world that I know -- at least not one that's existed for the past 20 years.

If you don't like the fact that privacy no longer exists, then either elect Congresspeople who will enact privacy laws (probably not going to happen), or I suppose, move to a cabin in the woods and live Ted Kaczynski-style. But to text and chat on your high-tech device claiming that the government's actions are unethical and unconstitutional, and that you're outraged by this affront ... get real. That ship has sailed long ago.

Update 6/13: Here's a great companion article on the myth of privacy:
The Top 5 Things You Didn't Know the Government Knows About You by Meagan Reed (HuffPo)

Fuel & Fickle Outrage

Ten or fifteen years ago, there was a sudden nationwide spike in the price of gasoline. Where I live, in California, a gallon was approaching $2.00 — which, at the time, was considered frighteningly high. The local news did a segment at gas stations, in which folks vented their frustrations. “At least at this station, the price is reasonable,” said one customer, prompting the reporter to quip, “$1.50 is reasonable?”

It was funny, because just a month or two earlier, $1.50 would have been seen as expensive. Today in some places of the U.S., four-dollar gas is normal now, and if it spiked up to $5.00 this summer, you can be sure that even $4.50 would soon be the new reasonable.

I think oil companies and OPEC should manipulate the public’s ongoing discontent with fuel prices, as a way to become way more profitable. It would just take a little conspiracy: Every six or nine months, have the price of gas shoot up by about a dollar, and keep it there for a couple of weeks. Then drop it back down — but not quite to where it started. Each cycle, the price creeps higher and higher. As long as the low price is much less than the outrageous number it came down from, relieved consumers will be delighted that they’re getting gas for a relatively reasonable price. If you keep shifting the standard of what’s reasonable, consumers will practically thank you and ask for seconds. Why hasn’t anyone thought of this??

Of course I’m kidding. The above scenario kind of already happens, and it says something about the way people think. A few years ago there was a lot of crowing when gas prices were pushing $4.50 ($5.00 in my area). Some SUV owners actually traded in their Suburbans and Hummers for more efficient cars. It was positively delicious. But now that the prices have been fairly stable for a couple of years, I see more SUVs on the road than ever. Consumers just don’t seem to care; I guess the price of gas is reasonable again. (Compared to Europe and other places, it’s been reasonable for a very long time.)

People tend to react against perceived change because they just don’t like change. If it costs them more money, then they really don’t like it. But in the long term, when standards and expectations are forced to evolve over time, the threshold for consumer outrage just drifts along with the tide. Like heat waves among climate change, the sudden fluctuations are clear to see, but the gradual global trend is less likely to get our everyday attention.

Then again, a lot of us just aren’t paying attention.

Dark Energy: Too Big To Fail

[1/31/13 update: Many thanks to David Wiltshire for clarifying some points in the comments, and for addressing critics of his ideas. -EC]

According to today’s mainstream science, about 71% of the Cosmos is made of something that scientists have never seen, detected, directly observed, or even indirectly observed. It’s “dark energy,” first described in the late 1990s as a repulsive or anti-gravitational property of empty space. By measuring supernovae in distant galaxies, astronomers inferred that not only is the universe getting larger, the expansion is getting faster with time. Physicists started speculating about what might be responsible for the acceleration, and the newly minted concept of dark energy quickly became the accepted explanation. In fact, today it’s built into the standard cosmological model of a universe that expands with an ever-accelerating rate.

Dark energy has also gone mainstream: As viewers of popular-science TV programs know well, in the very distant future, the repulsive effects of dark energy may become so dominant that they tear apart galaxies, stars, planets — eventually even the atoms that currently make up your body — in a highly dramatic “big rip” that marks the end of the universe.

From the outset, the concept of dark energy seemed to me like a bad idea. We had a set of observations we didn’t fully understand, and in response, we externalized the problem onto some unseen but supposedly real agent “out there” that must be to blame. It didn’t sound like the best approach. It seemed very possible that we misinterpreted the supernova measurements, so why the rush to invent a brand new form of energy (which would need to comprise three-quarters of the universe!) to explain this interpretation? Surely, no one can say that all other alternative explanations had been exhausted. Inventing dark energy was a bit like losing your homework assignment, and then promptly deciding that your family must have an invisible and undetectable dog who ate it.

It turns out that in 2007, David Wiltshire of New Zealand’s University of Canterbury explained how the apparently accelerating expansion of the universe could be an illusion due to our perspective in the Milky Way. According to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, a clock can run at different rates depending on the local strength of gravity; near a massive star, for example, a clock will run more slowly than an identical clock positioned far away. From the perspective of an observer close to the star, everything (including the nearby clock) will appear to be running normally, while the distant clock seems to run fast; to an observer near the clock in deep space, meanwhile, the local time will appear to pass normally as usual, but from that perspective, the gravitationally bound clock seems to run slow. Gravity’s effect on time is universally accepted. If your GPS receiver didn’t account for general relativity, your navigation directions would lose accuracy in minutes.

Wiltshire’s insight was that light from the supernovae traverses huge stretches of space where there is little to no matter, so clocks there would run fast as judged by observers near galaxies, such as ourselves. When astronomers study supernovae on the other side of these voids, the measurements are affected by the fact that the voids are expanding faster than the space closer to us (as judged here on Earth). According to Wiltshire’s calculations, if you lived in one of these voids, you’d judge the universe to be about 18 billion years old — several billion years older than how things appear here, where matter and gravity slow clocks as well as the expansion of space. The end result is that the Milky Way resides in a “Hubble bubble,” a local region beyond which all of the rest of the universe appears to be expanding away, at an accelerating rate. Similarly, if you lived in a galaxy on the other side of a large void, the Milky Way would appear to be accelerating away from you. You would be living in a Hubble bubble there, too.

The first time I read about Wiltshire’s insight, my reaction was disbelief: “Surely they must have thought of that!” But apparently, they hadn’t. The equations that cosmologists use to study the universe’s large-scale structure are extremely difficult to work with, so some simplifying assumptions have been made in order to construct workable models. One of these is to describe space everywhere as a uniformly expanding fluid. This assumption has been a part of the mathematics of cosmology (in the so-called Friedmann equations) since 1922, before we even knew there were other galaxies beyond our own. Given the brutally difficult equations, which could not otherwise be solved, the Friedmann solutions have been a part of cosmology bedrock ever since. However, we now know that the large-scale structure of the universe is not at all uniform; there are walls of galaxy clusters separated by enormous voids, so if Einstein is correct, the universe is not a uniformly expanding fluid. Time flows, and therefore expansion happens, faster in some places than in others.

Wiltshire argues that a necessarily uneven expansion of the universe previously hadn’t been considered because (1) physicists are used to considering relativistic effects on time only in the extreme conditions of black holes and particle-accelerator experiments, and (2) they have assumed that such effects in intergalactic space would be extremely weak. They are indeed weak, but Wiltshire has done the math to show how the cumulative effects become huge over billions of years and across vast distances of space.

According to Google Scholar, Wiltshire’s original paper has been cited 123 times to date; it’s certainly not being ignored. There appear to be few or no papers that refute the concept of non-uniform expansion due to relativistic effects. In fact, most of the papers build upon the idea.

So why, in 2013, is “dark energy” still a thing? Beats me! In his excellent book The Trouble With Physics, Lee Smolin describes how modern physics can unwittingly construct opaque, monstrous theories that become intellectual dead-ends with no practical uses, but which nevertheless persist for sociological and financial reasons. First, a few innocent working assumptions are laid down, and then models are built on those assumptions, and then others build upon those models, and so on — until there’s a mini-industry of researchers working in the field and collecting funding, with the original assumptions rarely re-examined. This is what has happened with dark energy: Even though we now have a viable explanation for the appearance of cosmic acceleration, a bad alternative has become entrenched. Careers have been forged based on the cosmological model that includes dark energy. And in a potential embarrassment for the ages, the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for what the prize committee called “the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe.” Dark energy is too big to fail!

Beyond academia, the public never should have been asked to have faith in a mysterious, undetectable force that’s out there but at the same time all around us. Invoking such ideas makes it impossible to maintain the clear distinctions between religion and science, at least in the public eye. But even today, the History Channel tells us “we now know” that most of the universe is made of mysterious dark energy. NASA does the same, on a public-education page called “Universe 101.” Houston, we have a problem.

Perhaps there are physicists who secretly hope the dark-energy concept will gradually die out. But in popular science, which is usually well behind the curve, the myth of dark energy will undoubtedly linger for years on the websites and the TV programs. We deserve better.

Why The Speed Of Light Is Constant

When many people first learn that the speed of light is constant — that it’s the same everywhere in the universe, and is measured the same by all observers — it all seems kind of arbitrary. It’s strange enough that the speed of light is a “cosmic speed limit,” beyond which no object can go. But, how can the speed of anything possibly be a constant value? When I’m in an airplane and I walk forward up the aisle, I am going faster than the plane itself, something that could be verified by an observer on the ground. My total speed, relative to the ground, will be the speed of the plane plus my walking speed. (Subtract the speed if I’m walking in the other direction, toward the tail.) Yet, if I measure the speed of a light beam coming from a laser aboard a plane or a spaceship, I’ll always get the same result of 186,000 miles per second, whether the beam is facing forward, backward, or sideways, or even if it’s beamed from the spaceship in any direction and measured on the ground. Why?

It actually has to be this way. A world in which the speed of light varied might be impossible logically (see below), or at least could be so messed up and incoherent that complex structures such as galaxies and intelligent life might not be possible.

Consider a thought experiment: You set up a rapidly rotating beacon in deep space, with a radio antenna on it. (Radio waves are an invisible form of light.) The antenna is transmitting a radio signal consisting of a sequence of natural numbers: 1, 2, 3, and so on. Far away from the transmitter, you tune in your receiver and wait for the beacon to start spinning and transmitting the sequence. What kind of signal will you receive?

That depends on whether the speed of light is constant or not. Let’s imagine that it isn’t. In that case, the speed of the radio signal in your direction would change according to the velocity of the transmitting antenna, as with the example of walking up the aisle of an airplane: As the beacon spins, sometimes the antenna would be coming toward you — which would “throw” the signal faster in your direction — and sometimes it would be moving away, which would subtract some miles per hour from the signal’s speed. So, parts of the signal would be traveling toward you faster than other parts. Naturally, if the speed of different portions of the signal is different, the faster portions will reach you sooner than the slower portions. This effect would worsen the farther away you are from the beacon, and the faster the beacon is spinning. You might end up receiving a steady sequence of numbers like this:

1 - 2 - 3 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 10 - 11 - 12 - 16 - 17 - 18 - 13 - 14 - 15 ...

Here, the 7 - 8 - 9 segment is arriving sooner than the 4 - 5 - 6 segment, even though it was actually transmitted later. If this were a television signal rather than a sequence of numbers, with the antenna on a large rotating disc, the program would be really messed up. A political candidate might be seen giving a concession speech, followed by a speech where he seems confident he’ll win. I’m not sure that causal impossibilities would result from incoherent information flying around the universe,* but surely the formation of large structures such as galaxies, responding gravitationally to far-away moving bodies, would be affected (if gravity would even exist in such a universe).

Now let’s consider what happens in a world where the speed of light is constant. In this case, all portions of the signal are transmitted at the same speed relative to you, even as the beacon rotates, so no portion reaches you faster than any other. The numbers arrive in the correct sequence, just as they were transmitted. However, the only way this can possibly work (as Einstein showed) is if measurements of time and distance change for various observers. For a transmitting antenna on a rotating beacon, this produces a relativistic Doppler effect — a slowing down and speeding up of the signal, almost like a vinyl record being played back off-center, something like this:

1 ---- 2 --- 3 -- 4 - 5 - 6 -- 7 ---- 8 --- 9 -- 10 - 11 - 12 -- 13 ---- 14 --- 15 ...

If the TV antenna on the disc were transmitting American Idol, you’d see the show from beginning to end without interruption — no unexpected spoiler — but the slowing down and speeding up might make it sound as if the singer and the band can’t stay on key to save their lives (which in reality happens sometimes).

As it turned out, the constant speed of light was confirmed by the Dutch astronomer Willem de Sitter in 1913, through observations of double star systems, where two stars are rotating around each other closely. He realized that if the speed of light varied as the stars advanced toward us or receded away, the orbits would appear erratic. The system might appear blurry or scrambled and incoherent, and from great distances the laws of motion would appear not to work at all. However, such was not the case in any system that de Sitter observed, and this was used as evidence to support Einstein’s special theory of relativity and the constancy of the speed of light. All observations made to date support the same conclusions.

Personally, I think that the constant speed of light is a hint that the universe is fundamentally informational (the “it from bit” hypothesis proposed by the great physicist John Wheeler). This idea says that matter/energy and spacetime emerge from a deeper layer of existence that’s based purely on information. In our universe, information in the form of light always passes from point A to point B in a coherent, sequential fashion, for every observer — it’s space and time (and even mass) that all change accordingly to suit it. There might be a lesson there.


* I haven’t been able to come up with a paradox of cause and effect, resulting just from some information traveling faster than other information. In the days when some news came by rail and some by telegraph, you might have heard that Lincoln’s assassin had been caught before you heard that Abe had been shot — but nobody went back in time to kill John Wilkes Booth. Still, I suspect there is a thought experiment that would show it couldn’t work. If you have any ideas, please comment.

How To Build A Free-Will Machine

One of the hottest topics in physics and philosophy these days is the question of free will. Do we humans make truly free choices in the world, or is this impression merely an illusion? It certainly seems as if we have free will, but if science teaches us anything, it’s that we can’t always trust our intuition: Feathers respond to gravity the same as bowling balls (in a vacuum), light does not travel infinitely fast, and the surface of a pond is not flat, but curves slightly with the shape of the Earth. Is free will wrong, too?

Those who subscribe to the reductionist school of thought would say that we do not have free will. According to this argument, a complete understanding of the world can be reduced to particles strictly obeying the laws of physics; therefore, whatever physical state you (i.e., the particles of your brain/body) and your environment were in prior to making a choice, there’s one and only one corresponding state afterward, and that means only one choice — predetermined by the earlier state of the atoms and molecules in your body. Some take this to the extreme, arguing that the future of everything in the universe is already decided, and that this future could be predicted with perfect accuracy in principle (if not in practice), given complete knowledge* of the universe’s present state. A different line of argument points to cognition experiments: It is now well known that our brain has already settled on a decision about a half-second before we consciously sense that we are deciding; therefore our conscious sensation of free will must be an illusion, it’s argued.

The term I use for this kind of thinking is “retarded.” I mean no offense; I use the term literally, that these arguments are regressive and backward, unimaginative, crippled by the Einstellung effect — they are based on old paradigms and leave no room for new, “outside the box” ways of thinking. (We used to think patterns on the surface of Mars were canals built by Martians; after all, we humans build canals on Earth, right? And, the Martians have human faces. That’s retarded thinking.) The experimental argument against free will is retarded, because it assumes that only our conscious self is capable of making free decisions. What if the actual free decision happens a half-second earlier in the subconscious, and only the conscious aspect of free will (“I think I’ll make a left turn here”) is the illusory part? The high-level executive functions of the brain, which include thoughts and sensations, are only a small part of consciousness, like the images displayed on a computer screen. There’s a lot more going on at deeper levels than it seems, and this is where free will may reside.

That leaves the physical, reductionist argument against free will. Prominent scientists including physicist Paul Davies and mathematician George Ellis reject this as well, on the grounds that strict reductionism does not apply to living systems. In the science literature there has been an explosion of research and theory on the role of information in biological systems, and we are seeing a groundswell of acknowledgment that in living organisms, information plays a causal role on the atoms and molecules of life. This recognition of “top-down” effects is changing our view of the bottom-up mechanisms which, according to traditional reductionist thinking, drive everything in the universe.

If information is fundamental to the way organisms (such as humans) operate, can we demonstrate that free will really exists by describing it in terms of information, rather than atoms and molecules? How would that work?

Let’s consider one of the most human-brain-like machines in the world, the Jeopardy-playing IBM computer Watson. Watson uses a sophisticated statistical approach: Given a Jeopardy clue, Watson compares keywords and strings of words with a vast database of information, runs a slew of algorithms simultaneously, and then comes up with a list of possible responses, assigning each a confidence level. If the confidence level of one response is sufficiently high, Watson rings in and gives a response. Google Translate and Apple’s Siri use similar statistical approaches. But no one in their right mind would say that Watson or Siri has free will; given exactly the same prompt and the same database — what scientists call initial conditions — the result will be entirely predictable. Despite being an incredibly complex computer, Watson is still not as complex as the simplest one-celled animal, let alone a human brain. So, how could we modify Watson so that it would start to exhibit qualities of free will?

Dynamics. That’s the key difference between Watson and living cells. Watson uses more or less a fixed database and operating rules, which is why, given the same clue, Watson would respond the same. But dynamics — in the form of highly complex, interacting internal changes — are one of the most obvious hallmarks of living organisms. If Watson were built with interacting dynamics, the results would be chaotic enough that Watson would begin to exhibit free-will-like qualities. For example, a random number generator could alter all statistical calculations slightly over time. That alone would make its responses more unpredictable. Another number generator could randomly remove access to sectors of the database, mimicking the imperfection of biological memory and recall. Watson’s thresholds — the risks it is willing to take — could go up and down slightly with time, as well as in response to external conditions (how far into the game it is, Watson’s score against those of its competitors, even the instantaneous temperature and air pressure). Watson could be given “moods”: If it missed a couple of clues in a row, it might get “bummed out” and avoid risks for a while. There could be positive and negative feedback mechanisms that either exaggerate or reduce risk-taking over time, based on several of the other factors. Changes in light levels and noises (such as a burst of laughter or applause) could “distract” Watson, causing the confidence levels to dip or fluctuate uncontrollably, with some distractions being longer than others, based on factors such as recent performance and the scores. “Fatigue” could set in, with the threshold for distraction going down not only steadily by time but also as a function of Watson’s performance and even the time of day. Watson might be given a mechanical “body” that must cooperate in order to play the game, this interplay dynamically affected by the body’s own complex dynamics and feedback mechanisms and distractions. (Too much ringing in? “Hand” cramps up.) And so on.

Given all of these extra dynamics, would Watson have human-type free will? Not quite. That would require piling on astronomical layers of complexity. Phrases in clues might conjure specific “memories” from its “life” that could either help or hurt performance; it could have multiple competing internal influences or “dialogues,” akin to Freud’s id and superego (or like Gollum/Sméagol from Lord of the Rings); and it could have advanced “emotions” such as jealousy or contempt, those emotions modulated by its “memories” as well as every other factor I’ve mentioned. That doesn’t even touch on the decidedly human skill of analytically understanding (and misunderstanding!) the true meanings of the clues the first place.

Regardless, adding only five or ten interacting dynamic parameters to the existing Watson would create a system sufficiently chaotic that its behavior might exhibit the free will of, say, a flatworm. Simple living creatures have enough dynamic complexity going on that it’s effectively impossible for us to recreate the same initial conditions, both internal and external, of any given choice it might have to make. So, even though a flatworm or a modified Watson will usually respond to a certain stimulus in a certain way, you can never know enough about the system to say for sure. Throw in the indeterminate/random nature of quantum-mechanical influences at the sub-cellular level (analogous to the number generators in modified Watson), and it becomes impossible even in theory to predict how choices will be made.

As far as I’m concerned, that means free will, even for a flatworm, or for a Watson. For a human being, with all of its complexities and frailties, it isn’t even a matter of debate.



* The “knower,” being a part of the universe, would need complete instantaneous knowledge of itself, including knowledge of the state of having learned the last fact about itself. Or, it would need to be external to the universe, which is defined as all that exists. Both options are logically impossible.

Global Warming: A Matter of Scale

When Hurricane Sandy made landfall this week, climate change roared back into the public consciousness. It seems that suddenly, something had to be done, even though the issue was barely mentioned in the election. As surely as the flood waters will recede, though, so will global warming in people's minds. We will go back to thinking about our jobs, our families, and our Honey Boo Boo.

People's fickle attention to big issues is maddening, but understandable. We don't do well with problems that extend well beyond the scale of everyday human existence. For millions of years, the human brain has evolved to tackle problems of immediacy: hunting for food now, escaping the predator now, feeding the crying baby now. The human scale of time is about seconds and minutes, maybe hours. Even planning for drought or famine next year requires vision and foresight that doesn't come to us instinctively. When confronted with the size and age of the universe, many people become uncomfortable, and for some, the idea that humans evolved from fish is laughable. The tools that we call common sense are best equipped to deal with the plainly obvious in the here and now.

By contrast, no issue in our lives is grander in scale than global warming. We began burning massive amounts of fossil fuels some 150 years ago, and the effects of doing so may continue for centuries. The atmospheric CO2 levels are like a giant locomotive that has been accelerating for generations, and continues to accelerate as industry takes over Asia and much of the Third World. All of this has happened effortlessly, as developing societies need lots of energy, and fossil fuels make that easy.

Looking at the big picture, it's hard to imagine slowing down and eventually stopping that locomotive based on our good intentions alone. Knowing about species extinctions and the bleaching of corals will motivate us only to a point. An immediate experience, like seeing the images of Sandy, is needed even to get people to be more than just intellectually "concerned" about climate change — that is, until the waters recede and a more pressing issue takes our attention elsewhere.

Part of the difficulty is our discomfort with matters of scale. When we humans see a problem, we want to fix it, and we want to see direct results from these efforts. If a room is dark, we switch on a light because we know this will help us to see. So when a Hurricane Sandy occurs, and we know that global warming is part of the equation, we intuitively seek an easy fix. To help us believe that global warming is within our control, we appeal to human-scale terms of cause and effect ("Plant a tree, cool the globe," one bumper sticker reads). Except there is no switch that will stop the Frankenstorms from coming. The Earth doesn't operate on a human scale, and given the complexity of the system — interactions between the atmosphere, the oceans, the methane-rich permafrost, etc. — even heroic efforts now may not stave off the effects of climate change in our lifetimes. The more ideological voices on the left cringe at hearing such discouraging news, but reality, like the planet, doesn't necessarily operate according to human-scale desires.

The only way to deal with climate change is to approach it on the same grandeur of scale as the issue itself. Over generations, we must shift our global mindset regarding energy and consumption. Clean energy, sustainable farming, and recycling should not be seen merely as ways to end global warming; instead, they must be seen simply as the right things to do. The 20th-century slash-and-burn approach to civilization is unsustainable, and a return to sustainability, at some point, will allow the planet to settle back into a healthier equilibrium. It's inevitable and has happened many times in the Earth's history.

Just don't expect to see results before the next airing of Honey Boo Boo

Responding To A Classic "Truther" Article

An online article titled "9/11 official story doubts becoming more mainstream" was going around Twitter today. That headline may or may not be correct, although I'm not sure what an "official story" is exactly (I've heard creationists refer to biological evolution as the official story). Despite the neutral headline, it turns out that the article is a straight-up rundown of points in favor of the controlled demolition hypothesis, with no attempt at balance. I tried commenting on the page, but it wouldn't take my comment. (It's a conspiracy to silence me!) So, for anyone interested, here's my point-by-point takedown of the article:

... Jesse Ventura’s recent appearance on CNN’s Piers Morgan. Ventura, an ex-navy SEAL and former governor of Minnesota who hosts a program on TruTV called “Conspiracy Theory”, appeared on Morgan’s show last week. After discussing 9/11, Morgan tried to dismiss Ventura and said he has “crackpot” ideas. Ventura then asked the audience, “How many people think I make crackpot points?” Only one audience member acknowledged. He then asked, “How many people think I make sensible points?” Almost the entire audience applauded him.

The fact that only one person objected to some well-phrased questions by Jesse Ventura doesn't prove anything. The person who did object, thankfully, was likely educated enough to know that Ventura's questions had rational answers.

Another good example is Colorado PBS’s airing of a documentary film that was created by Architects and Engineers for 9/11 truth. It is the first time a major news network has aired anything like it. The documentary, entitled: “9/11 Explosive Evidence - Experts Speak Out”, features dozens of architects and engineers who unequivocally state that the twin towers, and WTC 7 which was not hit by a plane, were brought down by controlled demolition.

The film aired on a single local PBS affiliate, not a "major news network" (WTF?). Each PBS station is free to air whatever programming they like, and PBS nationally is only a collection of stations, not representing any centralized authority. (The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is something else.) Notice how the article attempts to create the impression that the "major news network" somehow endorsed or was involved in making the film — for example, the article's very last sentence:

I simply encourage readers to watch the documentary that was broadcast on PBS, do their own research and draw their own conclusions.

People with legitimate arguments don't need to resort to such manipulative tactics. The fact is, Colorado Public TV is the only station of any kind to give this film airtime. The Movement would like us to believe that this occasion is a big deal. It's really not.

If the official story that fires brought the buildings down is to be believed, then 9/11 was an architectural and engineering disaster that should have led to an urgent and exhaustive inquiry, along with suggestions for improvements and upgrades for other buildings of the same construction.

Here's the really devious stuff. The disaster did lead to an urgent and exhaustive study over several years, with multiple revisions, and involved several local and national engineering and fire-safety organizations, which published their recommendations to prevent similar disasters. The type of intellectual dishonesty in the above quote, aimed at the more naive, is de rigeur for Truth literature. (It's a bit like: Hey, if we are to believe the official story that gasoline is flammable, there should be measures in place to keep cars from just randomly exploding, right? I mean come on!)

According to Victoria Alexander, writing for Digital Journal, three days before the 11th anniversary of the World Trade Center tragedy, the documentary ranked number three among "most watched" documentaries on PBS and number one among “most shared”.

That would be most watched and most shared among videos hosted on the Colorado PBS station's web page — not among "documentaries on PBS." Just a minor subtle difference there. (I'm not so surprised the 9/11 film performed better than Colorado Commitment: Sustainability Through Collaboration.)

Paragraphs 7–9 deal further with the popularity of 9/11 films. While supporting the article's headline, this does nothing to support the veracity of their claims. Most residents of Utah believe that Jesus lives on the planet Kolob; this does not indicate that he actually does live there. Kind of a basic logic thing.

In 2009, a research paper was published by several scientists in The Open Chemical Physics Journal in which traces of nanothermite, a military-grade explosive used to cut steel, were found in four separate samples of dust from the World Trade Center site that were analyzed by scientists. The conclusion :Based on these observations, we conclude that the red layer of the red/gray chips we have discovered in the WTC dust is active, unreacted thermitic material, incorporating nanotechnology, and is a highly energetic pyrotechnic or explosive material.

The Open Chemical Physics Journal is not a peer-reviewed scientific journal, meaning the nanothermite paper did not need to meet scientific standards in order to be published. (More on that in a bit.) This journal charges $800 to publish an article. Legitimate journals do not charge authors, they charge for subscriptions instead; the Open journals are essentially vehicles for self-publishing. Regarding nanothermite, I challenge anyone to find a neutral source confirming that such a substance is used to "cut steel" in a manner that could even potentially be used in a building demolition.

Any iron or sulfur "nanoparticles" in the samples likely come from the structural steel and gypsum wallboard in the towers, which were subjected to the release of gravitational potential energy equivalent to 1/70th of the Hiroshima atomic bomb — one for each tower, directed straight down at the tower's footprint. Which also explains why everything was pulverized to smithereens.

Still, the evidence presented by the lead author of the paper cited, Steven E. Jones, is dubious at best — there was no controlled chain of custody for the dust samples (actually they were sent to him through the mail), and no independent analysis. Further, on a separate occasion Jones also presented physical evidence that Jesus Christ visited America. (That article originally appeared on BYU's website, but was taken down around the time BYU placed Jones on academic leave for his 9/11 "research.") Professionally, Jones was a physicist who researched muon-catalyzed fusion, which makes him an authority on chemically analyzing dust samples about as much as a psychiatrist is qualified to perform cosmetic surgery. He has since retired and currently makes his living in the Truth Movement.

That study, however, never made it out of academic circles and into the mainstream media.

Wrong, it never made it into academic circles. There is a difference. If it had been peer-reviewed and passed scientific muster, the paper would have generated a ton of attention. No such peer-reviewed article has appeared in any legitimate engineering or fire-safety journal, anywhere. Of course, Truthers dismiss this by claiming that the scientific peer-review process has been infiltrated by this conspiracy. The parallels with the manufactured creationism–evolution "debate" are plainly obvious.

Another fact that has never been publicized in mainstream media is the amount of credible people that question the events of 9/11. The corporate media publicizes questions by people such as Rosie O’Donnell and Charlie Sheen, but ignore the people listed on Patriots Question 9/11, which include over 3000 professionals from the military, government, academia, engineering, aviation, architecture, etc., that question the official story. A quick browse of the list reveals that these are not a bunch of “crackpots”, but are professionals who have the knowledge and skills in their fields to ask legitimate questions about what really happened on 9/11.

It's wonderful that there are several thousand people who have signed petitions for this cause, some of whom have impressive credentials. But the list of Architects & Engineers for Truth is largely residential and small-office architects, designers, electrical engineers, etc., along with a bunch of "urban activists" and whatnot. Regardless, the existence of such a short list of supposed experts means nothing, considering that almost every structural engineer and architect in the world has not signed the petition! This is a little fallacy called selection bias. (You shouldn't be too surprised to learn that creationists have their own petition of scientist experts, too.)

Interestingly, there exists no petition of demolition professionals who support the demolition hypothesis. I wonder why that might be! On the other hand, we have the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which led the scientific studies of the disaster, and the Structural Engineering division of the American Society of Civil Engineers, which signed off on the findings and recommendations. But I suppose they've been bought out by the conspirators, too. Isn't it funny how none of these hundreds of people, indeed probably thousands, has ever come forward to blow the whistle and name names? Eleven years later and counting?

If most Americans come to believe that the terrorists responsible for the events of 9/11 are the same people that run huge corporations, banks, the U.S. government’s and Israel’s intelligence agencies, then that could change the dynamics of the political scene for years to come.

Now there's some nuance — huge corporations, banks, the CIA, and Mossad are the same people! You know, bad guys, like in cops and robber movies. That makes all of those things so much easier to collectively hate, and the dots so much easier to connect, doesn't it? Well, at least we know who is to blame for all of the world's problems. Oh and by the way, those banker–corporate–CIA–Jews also exploded the World Trade Center with nano paint chips. Wow, they really are bad guys.

The rest of the article deals with a justice on Italy's Supreme Court, and "Dr. Kevin Barrett, a Ph.D. expert on Arabic and Islam cultures." (Truther literature loves to pile on the redundant titles in order to make dubious authorities more impressive, e.g. "the physicist Professor Dr. Steven E. Jones, Ph.D., a scientist.") Not sure what to say about these strange bedfellows' opinions, except, well, the consensus of structural engineers and fire-safety professionals worldwide paints a slightly different picture. This involves not a vast and perfect conspiracy now in its second decade, but instead, planes, fire, and gravity. And "official" though this explanation may be, after 11 years of nonsense and noise, I'm prepared to take their word for it.