View 828, Wednesday, June 11, 2014

John Quincy Adams on American Policy:

Whenever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.

She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.

Fourth of July, 1821

1700 Wednesday. It has been a busy day. I have seen a ton of stuff, none of it singularity making but some probably world changing in ways not so easily predicted. None of it will lead us that much closer to self-replicating computers that evolved by Lamarckian rather than Mendelian evolution.

I will be asked tonight to predict what things will be like in 2044, and I am going to say that everything I have seen here, including the stuff just in development, will almost certainly be available as an ap for whatever you are carrying for a telephone in 2044. Your pocket computer will have more than 4 terabytes of storage, and in all likelihood more than 900 terabytes. It will have 64 CPU’s each one capable of doing what your multiple CPU system does now and then some.

Some stuff like the electron microscope they hope to sell for under $1000, will need some equipment as well as the connection to your smart phone, but it won’t cost any $1000. More like $30 bucks including shipment, and only that much because you bought the deluxe model. It may well be part of a device that takes your pulse and blood pressure, and takes a blood sample, after which you instantly get your blood sugar and the other numbers, but also calls to schedule you for a prostate exam or an MRI if it thinks it has discovered some anomalies. Good luck on that if you’re dependent on VA, but maybe you’ll be smart enough to be in Kaiser, which will have an ap on your phone that looks at a whole bunch of stuff about you and scolds you for your bad diet habits.

I was rather amused by a presentation about building super regenerative receivers at the 10 micron size level. I first encountered regenerative and super regenerative circuits in high school where Brother Henry had us reading Andrew Crissell’s Understanding Radio and mucking about with circuits in the back room. I next encountered regenerative circuitry when the Air Force wanted me to put astronauts into a chamber and cook them at 400 degrees F (with an 80 F breathing air feed) while doing complex tasks. The flight surgeon demanded a medical quality EKG in real time as a condition, and in those days you did a medical quality EKG by lying down on a metal table and being restrained as they put electrodes on you and the results flowed out to moving pens which wrote on ink on moving paper. And I was to do this with an unrestrained subject in a noisy lab environment.

Out came the Boeing Engineering Analog Computers, about 50 of them, and a rack the size of a small wall. We took the signal, noise and all, that were getting from the subject, filtered out as much noise as we could, fed that as intake to the next set, and kept that up until we got a signal that the flight surgeon could read. In other words we built a big regenerative receiver. So that was roughly twenty years since I played with this stuff in Brother Henry’s back room, with vacuum tubes. Now it was transistorized BEACs. Twenty years after that if you went to hospital they harnessed you and your EKG as on display at the nurses station wherever you were in the hospital. Today it’s probably an ap for your iPhone or easily could be. So think twenty more years…

Anyway that’s what I will be talking about. Also mind/computer interfaces as I used, primitively, in Oath of Fealty (1981), and much more sophisticatedly in Starswarm, (1998). If you haven’t read them, they still hold up very well, and I can say this after being in this conference.

I’ve had a great time, I learned a lot, and it’s interesting to see where the real nanotechnology people are going and what they are doing; my experience up to now has been more with the nanotechnology fandom that sees swarms of millions of 20 nanometer bugs commanded by thought control doing their master’s bidding, while saving the earth from being turned in to green goop by runaway rapidly evolving self replicating nanobugs. That may happen, but it won’t be before 2044, and I doubt it will be before 2144. By then maybe we’ll have a handle on this stuff. Or we’ll be hit by an asteroid and it won’t matter…

TERRORISM CRISIS

Al Qaeda, in Iraq, now has U.S. military weapons http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/11/world/middleeast/mosul-iraq-militants-seize-us-weapons.html and over 400 million in new financing

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/mosul-seized-jihadis-loot-429m-citys-central-bank-make-isis-worlds-richest-terror-force-1452190

I don’t think any comment is necessary.

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

It was foreseeable from the moment they sent in Brenner as proconsul and he disbanded the Iraqi army. It was forseeable from the moment we did not tell the Iraqi’s we were their liberators but also their conquerors and there were certain conditions … We had no need to go in there, but having done it we had some obligations to leave them stable – but that is not a condition that can be brought about through Liberal Democracy in Iraq. The conquest of Iraq was not the End of History and part of the transformation of the world into a peaceful league of liberal democracies, and those who thought it would inevitably be so were not only dead wrong, but ideologically blinded, and ignorant of history. Few of them were my readers, alas.

There are similarities to Afghanistan, but this is not the time and place for that discussion.

This is a serious matter; how will President Obama react? And how will President Putin react?

This is what collapse looks like.

http://hotair.com/archives/2014/06/10/mosul-falls-to-al-qaeda-as-us-trained-security-forces-flee/

I think it unlikely the US will commit ground forces to stop the rout; what if we were to loan the Iraqis an air force ,as we did to Kosovo in that war? I assume it is neither in our interest to see Al Queda gain greater power in Iraq nor to allow Iraq to fall deeper into Iran’s orbit.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Not bloody likely.

I applaud the ends, but deplore the means.

<http://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-teacher-lawsuit-20140611-story.html#page=1>

This is not a Federal issue, yet the legal reasoning rests upon the specious ‘disparate impact’ penumbra of the (unconstitutional, in my view) ‘equal protection’ clause of the (again, unconstitutional, in my view) Fourteenth Amendment.

——

Roland Dobbins

Agreed on both counts. Discussion when I get home.

Naming the new cyber-security building a USNA

The suggestions seem to be trending — surprise, surprise — toward Admiral Grace Hopper.

In addition to being a computational genius, Admiral Hopper was possessed of a great deal of wisdom, viz: Arrange to be told you’re too old to do something as early as possible and get it over with.

I didn’t put that in quotes because I’m reasonably sure I’m just paraphrasing her.

She also told Naval Officers to quit managing and start leading which vignette ought to be tattooed onto a sensitive body part ….

http://cdrsalamander.blogspot.com/2014/06/you-dont-get-chance-to-name-building-at.html

Agreed. I had to follow her as a speaker. Twice. Once in San Diego and once in Karlsruh. A very tough act to follow. Amazing Grace!

Antarctica Ice Sheet Melt due to Volcano

Not climate change or global warming, but a volcano under the ice sheet that is larger than previously known. Global Warming Alarmists will ignore this story, of course.

http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/06/10/Why-the-West-Antarctic-Ice-Sheet-is-really-melting-And-no-not-climate-change

Rick Hellewell

And no climate model yet has any explanation for the Viking Warm period or the Little Ice Age. They are simply ignored. The Earth has been several degrees warmer and several degrees colder than it is now in historical times, and all this is documented. The notion that the Gulf Stream affected Greenland, the Western Scottish Islands, the Eastern Scottish Islands, Belgium, Germany, Poland, and China, all reporting longer growing seasons and earlier spring in the Viking era, is too absurd to consider seriously. Not that I expect rationality to prevail. There are too many grants at stake.

For your reading pleasure:

No kiddin’, Sherlock

http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/magazine/physicstoday/news/the-dayside/freedom-and-physics-a-dayside-post?dm_i=1Y69,2IYZO,E1NJ7H,97JPO,1

JIm

Thursday AM:  packing up, get home at 2200 PDT, long day ahead.   All’s well.  It went well last night.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View 778 Sunday, June 16, 2013

Rumors abound as to how we will be involved in our new little war in Syria. We are about to subsidize al Qaeda, against whom we are in a formal war if we assume that our War on Terror has an actual opponent to be at war with, against the government of Syria which as the support of Hezbollah and Russia. I don’t know how this ends, but it is easy to predict some results: things will go badly for someone. There will be civilian casualties with a teddy bear involved. The US will be blamed for it. Eventually someone will win. If they don’t hate us, there will be a subsidized terror program designed to install a government that does hate us.

Our enemies are shooting at each other.

Jerry-

Has it been considered that the Sunni Shiite conflict has been suppressed since colonial times? And that our enemies are basically shooting at each other?

Could Obama be trying to balance the sides and keep the young men fighting each other and wasting energy and hate on each other. Last face off was Iran/Iraq war 1980-1988. I was in high school (and hence oblivious), but I don’t recall that being a time when we were concerned about terrorism. Facing down Russia, yes.

The strategy has been used, and filed in the back of my head is the notion that it is unpredictable and risky. But could it be the strategy? Could it be Putin’s strategy to encourage their Muslim minorities to send off the young hotheads to . . . I confess the temptation to insert something about David and Goliath and blood in the sands and I really must stop.

But, freely quoted "I will have more freedom of action after I am re-elected." And on Fox News Sunday Britt Hume noted that Whitehouse strategy for presidential exposure seems to have changed in the last few weeks. NSA basically sent out the press secretary to the Sunday shows. Hmm. . .

David Schierholz

Playing balance of power games, subsidizing one enemy to fight another, is a game of high risk and high skill.

Roberta doesn’t compact her Outlook.pst file often and the result is that today we got the dreaded corrupt pst message instructing us to run scanpst. That works – it’s running now and I assume it will run to completion and all will be well since it always has worked for me – but first you have to get it working. Windows and Outlook between work to make that difficult. First off, although the error message tells you to run scanpst.exe, you will not easily find scanpst on your Windows machine. The new and improved Windows search program sucks dead bunnies through a straw. Roberta’s computer had never heard of scanpst and told me to go away. Microsoft Help was as helpful as usual, which is not very. Since Roberta’s system was installed with everything using the default places you’d think this would be easy, but the Microsoft Find can’t find many program files. It doesn’t think it should let you know they exist.

Eventually I figured out where scanpst resides, which is in the same place the outlook startup file resides, hidden away in a deep drill; once you find the scanpst file you can click on it to open it, and browse for the outlook.pst file it needs to scan. Good luck on that one. It’s buried deep in the users area. Fortunately the actual path is given in the error message that sent you doing this task, so if you kept it alive can find where the pst file is hidden; if you didn’t you can try to start Outlook again, which will produce the error message again. This time keep it. Now start scanpst.exe again because the program can’t work if any part of outlook is open. Now browse down and down and down until you find the outlool.pst file, and Bob’s your uncle.

The default place for scanpst.exe is in program files (or program files x86 on a 64 bit machine) Microsoft Office/Office 12/ for Office 7. There are other folders for other versions of Office. Whoever thought up the Microsoft default folder scheme must have had access to controlled substances and a wicked sense of humor.

When Work Disappears – Excellent essay and comments

Dear Jerry,

Megan McArdle had an excellent essay Friday on the point that you have been making for decades: What happens when work opportunities disappear for those who most struggle to be employed?

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/06/14/when-work-disappears.html

Jim Ransom

Good essay. Recommended.  Thanks.

The free trade people, the comprehensive immigration reform people, the unions, the ruling cless and all its branches, and almost everyone else have been talking past each other on these points for years to no effect.

One would presume that “social scientists” would at some point see that as Moore’s Law continues the need for low skill work other than personal service vanishes into automation, and that a “Better Safety Net” translates into a large part of the population living off the dole and enjoying television. I believe back when historians studies history they called I Bread and Circuses, perhaps spiced with subsidized drugs. A nation with a large voting bloc that knows it does no useful work – I vote the X Party for a living – often develops undesirable character traits. We have known this for a long time, but it is now not politically correct to say so.

And we are still discovering what is in the Affordable Health Act, which turns out to be incentive to eliminate much of the health care that is already afforded.

We live in interesting times. And we have yet to discover what else is in the Act that we had to pass so that would could find out what’s in it. Sometimes I think they put things in the DC water supply several years ago and are now getting around to doping the water in Fairfax County.

View 765 Monday, March 04, 2013

Silicon is cheaper than iron:

Seagate to stop production of 7200RPM laptop drives –

Hi Jerry,

Here’s a break from politics, and back to technology.

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/03/seagate-is-done-making-7200rpm-2-5-pure-hard-disk-drives/

I’m not sure I agree with their reasoning, but I did switch to Western Digital a while ago – their 7200 RPM Scorpio Black 750 GB laptop drive is my standard. I’ve dropped those into a dozen or so Mac, without a single issue or failure.

I’d had a number of Seagate drives fail outright, and then tried two of the Momentus XT’s, but my experience was rather poor they are incompatible with many whole-disk encryption solutions, and both the ones I tried were bad out of the box or failed shortly after install. Many folks at my company have had the same issue – particularly with Mac’s. It’s the wrong time of the year, but I’d award the Momentus XT a half-orchid/half-onion. Great idea, poor execution.

Still, it shows the impact of falling SSD prices. Eventually spinning disks may head the way of the dodo for laptops (but for desktop storage, magnetic is still king).

Cheers,

Doug

Way back in S-100 Bus days I said that “Silicon is cheaper than iron,” and predicted that the future of spinning metal as mass storage was limited; it would be taken over by chip-based drives. That turned out to be true, but it took a long time for it to happen. What I had not factored in was that the new computing power – faster CPU’s, faster and cheaper memory – would influence the efficiency of hard drives. Once I saw that new software making use of the new computer power was being used to guide greater accuracy in machining spinning metal, and even more to the point to make for better data separation thus increasing dramatically the amount to be stored on a hard drive, it was clear that spinning metal had a longer future than I had thought.

Moore’s Law is inexorable, though. Exponentials generally are. Of course this is not a true exponential, is an S-curve or ogive, and at some point it will level off – exactly as the hard drive technology was on an S-curve with ever rapid improvements in speed and data storage eventually levels off. We discussed S-curves in The Strategy of Technology, a book which still holds up and is still used in some military planning circles. Although the examples were all drawn from the Cold War and need to be updated, the principles remain true.

My prediction that silicon drives would obsolete spinning metal drives took a long time to come true, but it seems finally to be coming to pass.

Silicon is cheaper than iron. And that has consequences.

What is truth?

Friscos for Scientists I: “Correlation Does Not Imply Causation”

http://bigthink.com/e-pur-si-muove/friscos-for-scientists-i-correlation-does-not-imply-causation

Interesting article on overuse of statistical terminology.

-Dave

It is a well done article which points to another on Slate that I have not read. Of course correlation implies causation. It does not prove causation. It does suggest hypotheses. Hypotheses which can be falsified can make theories increasingly likely to contain truth. That’s the way science works. Of course some correlations generate theories that can’t be tested.

Obama DHS Purchases 2,700 Light-Armored Tanks to Go With Their 1.6 Billion Bullet Stockpile

Posted by Jim Hoft on Sunday, March 3, 2013, 9:55 PM

http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2013/03/obama-dhs-purchases-2700-light-armored-tanks-to-go-with-their-1-6-billion-bullet-stockpile/

Which raises the question of why?  Has the Congress gone mad, or does it not know of these expenditures? Given the cuts due to sequestration, it would seem to me that equipping a Praetorian Guard capable of governing without the consent of the governed might not be so urgent as, say, Air Traffic Controllers or even TSA airport safety officers. According to this article – and I am not at all familiar with the web site –  this is a force more suitable to suppression and intimidation of popular resistance than one designed to overcome any easily foreseen terrorist threat.  Perhaps someone knows more about this?

If you haven’t seen these, they are worth looking at. We don’t know as much about the Earth/space environment as we thought we did.

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2013/08jan_sunclimate/

http://www.space.com/20004-earth-radiation-belt-discovery.html

"A student used food to make an inappropriate gesture."

<http://www.ktnv.com/news/watercooler/194673111.html>

Roland Dobbins

You just can’t make this stuff up. Meanwhile, the Secretary of Homeland Security confirms that TSA agent have been cut back because of the sequester. I have not heard whether any bunny inspectors are at risk. 

Jerry,

Sifting through the wave of nonsense on the internet regarding the DHS/ICE MRAP vehicles, I found a few things.

First, the original photos of those seem to date back to 2009.

Second, the MRAP in the photos does not seem to match the exact type of the 2700+ MRAP refurbishment contract Third, there is some stuff about the DHS getting about 60 surplus MRAPs following a source selection contract, and those 60 appear to match the ones seen in the photos.

Fourth, the 2700+ refurb contract was about a year ago and was supposedly for the Army.

Of course, that’s just the result of an hour of insomniac web browsing. There may be more, but don’t believe anything that doesn’t have a better source then another alarmist "news" site. From what I could tell, this report was a nearly word for word cut-paste from a wave of identical "news" reports from mid-2012. None of which changes the fact that DHS appears to be operating at least 2 mine resistant armored personnel assault vehicles within the united states…

Still, I think people are putting 2 and 2 together and getting impending urban warfare as the sum. I personally don’t see why the DHS/ICE ought to be operating 60 or even 2 of these things, and writing "rescue" on the side is big brother doublespeak straight from Orwell’s 1984. Given the utter absence of land mines and IEDs in the 48 contiguous states and given the current "budget crisis", I figure these things ought to be sold on ebay or at the very least sold for scrap. We don’t need them and they’re expensive to run/maintain. If anyone seriously tells you that we DO need them, look closely for the jackboots and subdued swastika because they’re not in the game for our interests.

Serving officer

I suspected the story was more complicated that that web site said.  Still, it is well to stay informed in matters such as this.  As you say there is no need for security forces to have that sort of gear.  At Waco the Attorney General had to lie to the Army in order to get tanks, and the Army is not at all happy about the outcome. 

View 709 Monday, January 16, 2012

Huntsman withdraws and endorses Romney. The only surprise here is that it took so long after New Hampshire. That is probably because it took a few days for Huntsman’s father to decide he didn’t want to pay any more to keep the campaign going. The Huntsman Corporation is huge, and Jon Huntsman Junior’s father is worth at least a billion. He could easily afford to finance more campaigning, but it is pretty clear that Huntsman could not win the nomination. I’m sure Huntsman Sr. took one last poll and confirmed that, then declined to pay any more for the campaign.

Candidate Huntsman has been CEO of the Huntsman Corporation prior to being a successful governor of Utah, so he has both private and public executive experience. He has connections to both the conservative and the establishment wings of the Republican party, but it is important to note that Huntsman was one of the few Reagan White House staffers who got promoted (to Assistant Secretary of Commerce) by George H W Bush. Bush did not much care for Reagan or Reagan’s people and systematically eliminated them from both the White House and other Executive Department positions. Bush I later appointed Huntsman to be Ambassador to Singapore; he was the youngest US ambassador in about a hundred years.

He was very effective as an ambassador to Singapore, then Indonesia, and later China, and is an obvious candidate for Secretary of State no matter who wins the nomination. He is not so enamored of the country club Republicans as to be repugnant to the conservatives, and his diplomatic skills are great.

Huntsman is a fairly representative of the younger generation of what is generally called the Establishment, holding positions considerably more conservative than the self-styled Liberal Republicans of Rockefeller’s day. He is not notably an opponent of the notion of “Big Government Conservatism.” We probably have not heard the last of him.

I note that Newt’s latest ads are back to the positive track, and I haven’t heard the highly negative anti-Romney ads lately; but then I don’t get local South Carolina radio and TV programs.

The Climate Change debate has opened again.

"New molecule could help cool planet" actual conclusion.

The important part of this whole article is contained here "The molecules detected by the research team occur naturally in the presence of alkenes, chemical compounds which are mostly released by plants.

"Plants will release these compounds, make the biradicals and end up making sulphuric acid, so in effect the ecosystem can negate the warming effect by producing these cooling aerosols," Percival said."

Conclusion:

When there is more CO2, plants grow larger and faster (plant growth is up at least 7% right now worldwide). When there are more and bigger plants, there are more of these cooling molecules. Result, whatever warmth CO2 adds is offset by these molecules.

If CO2 produces more warmth, plants can grow at higher latitudes, result, more total plants, more cooling molecules, see above.

If CO2 produces more warmth, there will be more evaporation, more rainfall, less deserts, more plants, see above.

Final conclusion, it appears that the geoengineering we need to prevent global warming is already present. This rather explains how this planet has managed to maintain a relatively even temperature for so long, despite such things as the faint early sun paradox and such. It appears that this planet has many such things that do this, like the chemicals given off by plankton (dimethylsulfide) that are stimulated by warmth and aid in cloud formation and thus shade, cooling things down again, the way warmth creates evaporation creates clouds that move heat from down here to up there where it can be radiated away while it drops cooling rain, fans us with wind, and acts as a sunshade (there is a band of thunderstorms constantly around the equator doing just this right now), and probably others. This can explain why the global warming prophesied by the computer models has not occurred, and why the label attached to that has had to change, first to "climate change" and then to "climate disruption", both of the latter suffer from the problem of then explaining exactly how CO2 can do anything but produce warming. Unfortunately, in a world with already present, free biradicals, DMS, and sunshade clouds, we are not in need to spent trillions to offset something that seems to have plenty of things to handle it already.

In other words, chill out, literally.

Oh, and throw another log on the fire.

D

==

“Pollution-gobbling molecules in global warming SMACKDOWN:”

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/01/16/criegee_biradicals/print.html

I saw a story on this a few days ago but it didn’t register – the thrust of the earlier story was the potential use of Criegee biradicals as climate change agents. Now the importance becomes clear. These Criegee biradicals are another important element of our atmosphere that was not fully known or appreciated, and thus not part of climatic models. I guess the bishops of AGW must recast their catechisms — er — models.

Ed

I have said repeatedly that the proper approach to the Climate Change crisis is not financially disastrous limits to technology and economic growth, but the development of engineering methods to enhance natural forcing mechanisms. Admittedly the existence of proven means of changing climate would bring about enormous political pressures: while it is likely that most of us would be better off in a world a bit warmer with a bit more CO2, there are also those who would prefer a dead halt and stability, and a few who would prefer a rollback to the climates of the 1940’s. The politics would get fierce – but at least there would be something to debate.

What we have now is uncertainties.

And on that score, Mike Flynn, the best statistician I have met since Tukey, says:

Death by Data: The End of Science as We Once Knew It?

There is a disturbing article in The Atlantic dealing with the steadily increasing mountains of data, the ease of storing them, the expenses of reviewing and editing them, the ease of sharing them, etc.

"To Know, but Not Understand," by David Weinberger

http://m.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/01/to-know-but-not-understand-david-weinberger-on-science-and-big-data/250820/

Summarizing briefly:

Henri Poincare famously said that just as a house is not simply a pile of bricks, science is not simply a pile of facts. It is the construction of those facts that make a science. No fact is self-explaining. It is only when facts are joined together in the light of a theory that they have any meaning. The problem today is that there are too damn many bricks.

Weinberger writes:

"For Sir Francis Bacon 400 years ago, for Darwin 150 years ago, for Bernard Forscher 50 years ago, the aim of science was to construct theories that are both supported by and explain the facts. Facts are about particular things, whereas knowledge (it was thought) should be of universals. [bf added]

"We therefore stared at tables of numbers until their simple patterns became obvious to us. Johannes Kepler examined the star charts carefully constructed by his boss, Tycho Brahe, until he realized in 1605 that if the planets orbit the Sun in ellipses rather than perfect circles, it all makes simple sense. Three hundred fifty years later, James Watson and Francis Crick stared at x-rays of DNA until they realized that if the molecule were a double helix, the data about the distances among its atoms made simple sense. With these discoveries, the data went from being confoundingly random to revealing an order that we understand: Oh, the orbits are elliptical! Oh, the molecule is a double helix!

A theory is a narrative that "makes sense" of the data. From the theory we can predict the data and deduce the mathematical laws that describe their regularities. The laws are the cement between the bottom layer of data and the capstone of theory. When the theory predicts thus-far-unknown data, we have the opportunity to confirm or falsify the theorem. It’s all great fun.

Starting already years ago, instrumentation in the factory began delivering continuous data on strip recorders and the like. This overturned the old spot-checking at discrete time points and resulted in a heap of data and what I called "paralysis of analysis." This has been happening in science, in spades, and folks don’t always realize that they are applying statistical methods that were developed for sparser data streams, where the challenge was to extract meaning from meager samples. A t-test is useless for two large data sets because for large enough values of n there will always be a non-zero difference between them.

Weinberger tells of a program, Eureqa, which will jump into the mass of data and noodle around until it constructs equations that predict the outcomes with tolerable accuracy. Sounds like a combination of orthogonal factor analysis and step-wise regression on steroids. (I assume it pays attention to functional coupling, covariance, and variance inflation factors.) What comes out are equations that accurately produce the Ys, but whose factors may not correspond with any physical factor. The result is equations that work, but the researcher does not understand what they mean.

One is reminded of Billy Ockham and his razor. He said we should keep the number of terms in our models as small as needed for them to work, because we would not otherwise understand the model. The real world, he added, could be as complex as God wished. Weinberger seems to be getting at the same issue. The modern way of science, which ran from Bacon and Descartes to our own time, may have to give way to some other way of knowing; just as medieval way science gave way to the modern. Weinberger calls that a different way of knowing things; but I am inclined to go with his title and say it replaces understanding with simple knowing. I did a typically discursive blog post on this at http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2012/01/autumn-of-modern-science.html

Now, if the factors churned up by Eureqa-like programs out of brickyards full of data, are not explicable as physical entities, we would have to say that the important factors are "hidden." The researcher knows what his inputs need to be to get the outputs; but he doesn’t know how he gets them. "Hidden" is what "occult" means, and the use of occult powers of nature to manipulate nature was called "magic."

So it may be that Arthur C. Clarke was more right than he knew when he said that a sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic.

Mike Flynn

When I studied Philosophy of Science under Gustav Bergmann at the University of Iowa in the 1950 I concluded that the scientific method was essential to knowing anything, and in keeping with young people of that time I thought that the relentless application of the scientific method would solve all problems. We knew how, now; all we needed was to learn the methods and apply them. Bergmann was a member of The Vienna Circle and thus an extreme positivist, and at the time I found that very attractive. I later learned to modify my logical positivist views to something closer to Karl Popper’s views, but that’s a subject of a much longer essay. The point is that we were certain that there was nothing we could not understand by the relentless application of logic.

At the same time, academic psychology was divided between the behaviorists who debated the distinction between hypothetical constructs and intervening variable and used pseudo-mathematical formulas with unknowable terms in them to appear “scientific” as opposed to the Freudians and their orthodox and heretical descendants who used case histories rather than data, and postulated Ego and Id and other concepts. (One late descendent of Freud, through Jung, is L. Ron Hubbard with his Dianetics.)

Most of that nonsense is gone from academic science now although it remains as “theory” in Modern Languages Departments and in some of the Voodoo Science departments; but the optimism of positivism as modified by Popper remains.

Now we have to wonder if we do have the tools we need to understand the data we have. Most Climate Scientists don’t really know how their models work; they postulate various feedback loops, but there are enough variables in there (give a physicist five manipulable constants and a couple of functions and he can explain anything) that can be adjusted to – well, to what? What no model has yet done is to start with the initial conditions of some distant time in the past – at least fifty years – and let it run to generate that actual climate history since then.

And perhaps that is the key here: the models are falsifiable propositions. They can only be tested by seeing if their predictions come true. It is argued that the consequences of ignoring the disaster predictions are so severe that we just can’t wait: we have to start making trillion dollar decisions now, because the models tell us that we have no choice.

Sometimes philosophy of science can be important. Pity that not very many modern students know anything about it. It used to be called Epistemology, and was one of the foundations of philosophy, but that, too, appears to be headed into extinction. And it’s lunch time, and I don’t want to spiral down into rambling about The Coming Dark Age. Despair is a sin.

Instead, rejoice: there may be an engineering solution to Global Warming, assuming that nature hasn’t already beat us to it.