Spirit

When I was in elementary school, or maybe middle school, I had a deep philosophical discussion with some of my classmates. Well, as deep as kids our age were wont to go. The topic was belief and our profound conclusion was that it didn't matter what you believed, you could believe in god or not, or most anything at all, and it didn't really make any difference in our lives. What I did not understand at the time was that we didn't have much choice about how we lived our lives, and making choices is where belief comes into play. Your beliefs have a big influence on the choices you make in your life. Some of your choices may seem obvious, or there might appear to be no viable alternative, but many of those may have been decided a long time ago based on some other decision that you did make.
    In the Science Fiction novel Absolution Gap by Alastair Reynolds, one of the main characters (Quaiche) has contracted a virus, an indoctrinal virus that can cause an overwhelming feeling of religious belief. For a long time the virus does not cause Quaiche any serious problems, it is sort of simmering in the background. Eventually Quaiche finds himself in life-or-death risky situation, his defenses are down and virus is able to establish itself as real force in his personality.
    When I first read this I thought it was an interesting concept. With all the advances in biotechnology who knows what kinds of things we will be able to do a thousand years from now. But then I had another thought: could it be that the religious belief found in people today is caused by a virus? It's kind of an odd concept, and it seems unlikely, but given how much we know about how people work (almost nothing), it could be.
    I am not a religious person. Christianity is all right with me for the most part. A great many people in this country claim to be Christians, and most of them are good citizens and good people. I do not understand other people's belief in god. It makes no sense to me. Sometimes I think people become religious in order to help them cope with some misfortune that has befallen them, or perhaps to alleviate some of life's confusion. I am not sure, but I suspect that is not always the case.
    God is a spiritual thing, meaning it has no physical substance. In a like manner thoughts and personalities may be considered spiritual as they likewise have no physical substance. You could say they exist as electrical currents in the brain, but we have no way to separate any individual ideas from the entire collection of electrical impulses that are going on in anyone's brain all the time. The electrical currents in your brain support your thoughts, but they are not the same thing as thought.
    Computers could be viewed the same way. A computer that has crashed, or is caught in an endless loop is indistinguishable from a computer that is hard at work making some vital calculations. So computer programs are essentially spiritual. I mean, they are not very spiritual, being as most computer programs are not even as smart as a single bacteria, but their essence is not related to the hardware or the electricity that drives them.
     Once upon a time I saw a program on TV about a Hindu temple in Southern India. There was a picture of one building, the roof of which was covered with small figures of Hindu gods. Seems there are a zillion of them, perhaps even more than there are people.
     I put this all together and came up with the idea that each one of Hindu gods is like a computer subroutine (procedure/function). In order to have a properly functioning human brain, you might need something like 7 billion subroutines.
    A mental subroutine would not be a set of instructions like in a computer, but could be composed of multiple disparate elements, like neurological connections, hormones, and even location. One neuron might be involved in multiple subroutines. Babies I think are born with an enormous set of built in functions/Hindu gods. Everything they learn is another always increasing set, well, increasing until you get to be my age and your brain fills up and starts overflowing onto the keyboard.
    Through The Wormhole is on TV tonight, talking about how robots might become just like real people. It's not that far off, and it is not going to take some major breakthrough by some genius. Eventually someone will have a very capable machine and will need to write a executive program to control it, and they will write some simple minded loop to keep tabs on everything that is going on, and, presto, it will come alive.

This post started on the topic of belief, but got side-tracked. Now that I've gotten that out of my system perhaps I will be able to get my mind back on the belief track.

Professionals

The reason the world is such a mess, other than it's full of people, is that the national security of the USA is in the hands of professionals. This started when WW2 came along and we decided to jump in with both feet. That was such a success that we turned the whole war machine over to the military and let them run essentially unchecked. Further, they have sold their outlook to every president who has some along, and the presidents have continued to let them run. It's like a runaway train. It's really scary to anyone who is alongside the tracks when it comes by (god forbid you should actually be on the tracks), and it might seem that way at first to the guy who climbs into the cab, but once you get your hands on the controls and feel the power at your command it becomes a rush and you get sucked into the whole 'the military is the way, the truth and the light', and off we go charging into one swamp after another. It's going to take a hell of a man (person) to pull in the reins on this cabal of vipers.

Iron Sky

This is a really silly movie. It has its funny bits, the little blond Nazi schoolteacher is cute, and the CGI spaceships and space scenes were pretty impressive, but this teaser covers it pretty well. With as much effort as they put into this you could have made a pretty good movie, instead they made this foolish comedy. I wonder if they will ever make back the $10 million they spent to make it.

The Sand Reckoner

from page 100 of the The Bellini Card by Jason Goodwin

Archimedes was the original Sand Reckoner. I am not quite sure what the above diagram (found here) has to do with Archimedes argument, but it was the best illustration I could find in short order. I found another drawing that points out some interesting features of this diagram, if you are interested. I was hoping to find some pictures of tiles made based on this figure, but no so such luck.

Rolling a 707

This photo is from a demonstration flight done way back in 1955 by Tex Johnson. He rolled a 707  airliner over Seattle using a maneuver called a Chandelle, at least that's what I think he said in this video (it's short: not even two minutes). The video is not very clear. You can infer that the aircraft rolls over, but you can't actually see it.
    I had a hard time figuring out just what I was looking at in this photo. I finally realized we are looking right along the leading edge of the wing. The 707's engines stick way out in front of the wing. The pylon for the inboard engine cuts across the top left corner of the photo.
    Near as I can tell no one else has rolled an airliner and lived to tell about it except the crew of an All Nippon Airways airliner that did it accidentally a couple of years ago.
    I know commercial aviation would be aghast at the idea of anyone doing anything fun in an airliner, but I for one would feel better if they were to take the trouble to find out just how capable these planes are and to demonstrate it. I would much rather fly in an airplane that can recover from rolling over than one that can't.

Automation

Modern airliners are so advanced they practically fly themselves. The only crew they really need is a pilot and a dog. You need the pilot just in case, heaven forbid, there should be an emergency. The dog is there to bite the pilot if he touches anything.

Stolen from E.B. Misfit.

Barnard's Star

I've been reading up on parsecs and I've gotten a little side-tracked. The ESA (European Space Agency) put up a satellite a few years ago to map all the stars in the sky, well, the brightest million or so anyway. Not all the stars are fixed to the firmament, some of them, like Barnard's star are wandering around loose. You would have be pretty persnickety to tell, but the robot satellite Hipparcos and Dennis di Cicco, astronomer extraordinaire, managed to do so. The jaggy line running up the center of the diagram is the star's path according to Hipparcos.  The round black spots are M. di Cicco's observations. Notice that the period of time covered is about two years while the change in position is about 18 arc-seconds. At an arm's length from your eye that is about 3/1000th's of an inch, or about the thickness of a sheet of 20 pound paper. Not very freaking much. It took two years to travel that far and it's traveling somewhere around 100 miles per second. Compare that to the 5 miles per second you need to reach low Earth orbit.
    Barnard's Star is about 6 light years from Earth, which makes it one of the closest stars and also makes it's motion detectable.