Does It Compute?

John Allen Poulos -- Irreligion

John Allen Poulos is a mathematician who has written a series of short popularizing books revolving around mathematical issues. I first got to know his work through his book Innumeracy, a brilliant exposition of how people ignore mathematical issues and the harm it can cause them.

I just finished his latest book, Irreligion, subtitled “A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up.” Poulos takes a dozen of the most common arguments for the existence of God and demolishes them.  But his approach, unlike the attack-dog stance of Richard Dawkins (who argues in his “The God Delusion” that raising children is any given religion is a form a child abuse), is wry, witty and common-sensical – irreligious in a word.  Here’s a sprinkling of quotes from the book and authors he quotes.

Voltaire: “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

Poulos uses simple probability calculations to show that “confirmation of a person’s unreliable statement by another unreliable person makes the statement even less reliable.”

“It’s been my experience that everything being equal, people are more impressed by fatuous blather that they don’t understand than by simple observations that they do. Disdaining Occam’s razor, they like their explanations hirsute.”

Ambrose Bierce’s definition of “pray:” “To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.”

“Since literal truth is not always the paramount concern of people, it seems that the untruths underlying faith may make ordinary life more bearable.”

Stephen Weinberg: “With or without religion, good people will do good, an evil people will do evil, but for good people to do evil, that takes religion.”

Recent Reads

Of the books I have recently read, two stand out. Both are historical novels, that is, novels that deal with real events and people. The first, The Lacuna, by Barbara Kingsolver is the story of a half-Mexican half-American baker’s boy who becomes the lead plaster mixer for muralist Diego Rivera (because the process of mixing white French pastry dough is similar to the process of mixing plaster), then a close friend of artist Frida Kahlo and one of Trotsky’s secretaries up to his assassination by one of Stalin’s agents. Following Trotsky’s assassination, he moves back to the United States and gains fame as a novelist before being hounded to death during the McCarthy purges.

The second also deals with World War II. Beautiful Assassin by Michael White is the story of a female Soviet sniper (based on a real person) who has recorded 300 kills of Germans, one at a time. Eleanor Roosevelt invites her to tour the US to support the war effort, and the KGB (then NKVD) presses her into service in an attempt to spy on the Roosevelts. Most of the novel deals with two themes: her conflict as a soldier (to do her duty and support her country) and her repugnance at being forced to spy on someone who has become her friend and the “place of women” in the armed forces and in life in general.  She falls in love with her translator (who of course is also a spy, on the American side) and eventually defects. 

A related World War II novel, Night Witches by Bruce Myles, chronicles the heroic activities of Soviet women airmen (airwomen?) at a time when the best female role model the United States could come up with was “Rosie the Riveter.”

People Who Can't Type

To paraphrase Steve Jobs in his “challenges of starting Apple”

“[Lawyers] couldn’t type. We realized: Death would eventually take care of this.”

A New Twist on Attorney Signature Blocks

Everybody is familiar with those interminable signature blocks about attorney client privilege, the Treasury Dept., IRS etc.  Here’s a new one I saw the other day on an attorney’s email:

NOTICE: The National Security Agency may have read this email without warning, warrant, or notice. They may do this without any judicial or legislative oversight. You have no recourse nor protection save to actively petition your President, Congress and Senate, to revoke the USA Patriot Act (USAP Act) and any other laws that attack the 4th Amendment to the US Constitution, or to replace them through the election process at the earliest possible time.

That pretty much says it all.

Every PR Department Needs a Supply

A “newscast” on The Onion television a couple of months ago announced a new drug called “Despondex,” intended for the “approximately 20 million Americans who are insufferably cheery.” Everybody knows people like this and certainly most PR and marketing departments could use a good supply. Check it out at The Onion.

Discover Your Inner Fish

I have just finished reading “Your Inner Fish. A Journey into the 3.5 Billion-Year History of the Human Body” by Neil Shubin. Fascinating and extremely well-written.

Basically, Shubin extends Darwin’s “descent with modification” back in time and scope to a cellular level. He shows that at the outset, the basic embryos of all animals are the same, and that specific gene sequences in DNA “turn on” or off certain types of development. Thus in the embryo, the “four arches” – the gill region of a human and shark look extremely similar, they just develop differently. Humans share a deep parentage with sharks.

Studies as early as the 1800s demonstrated that all organs in chickens – and everything else, fish, reptiles and mammals – can be traced to one of three layers of tissue in the developing embryo. So the structure of the early embryo is the same in virtually all creatures.

Shubin shows that the structure of the human hand developed in the fins of very early fish 350 million years ago when they were making the transition to land. The hand structure let them “walk” on their fins, possibly to get out of the water to escape from larger predators.

He goes on to demonstrate how this works for various appendages, ears, eyes, develop. For example, if you take the gene that is responsible for developing eyes in a mouse, and splice it into the DNA of a fly the fly develops an extra eye – a fly eye. So the gene is identical, it works and does the same thing in both cases, but what comes out of it is different.

The most fascinating part is the way he can trace this sort of development all the way back to the development of multi-cellular organisms. The net result is to be able to demonstrate that we all descend not just from earlier mammals, but from worms, sponges, and sharks. 

A must read.

Made in the USA??? NOT

When was the last time that you bought anything that was NOT made in China, Taiwan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Mexico, etc?  This occurred to me when I turned over my new Kindle 2 and noticed: "assembled in China."

The US has virtually no competitive heavy industry any more. State of the art heavy industrial products such as Bullet Trains (Germany, Japan, France); nuclear power (France) are dominated by other countries. The steel industry has only partly recovered from its utter collapse some years ago. And it would be impolite to even mention the American auto industry, with GM stock at under $2.00 and the company virtually bankrupt.

As for other products:

Budweiser, "the king of beers" is now the king of Belgian beers. (and in the interests of equal time, Coors is owned by Molson (Canada) and Miller is owned by a South African brewery).

The archetypal chocolate company, Nestle's, is Swiss owned (and Nestle's also owns Perrier, Purina dog food, Friskies cat food and Gerber baby products).

Your Blackberry is Canadian (RIM) and Nokia, the leading cellphone company in the world, is Finnish.

A number of major supermarket chains are now British-owned.

As far as software companies are concerned, Lexis Nexis is owned by the Dutch (Reed Elsevier) and West is owned by the British (Thompson-Reuters). Autonomy (British) has just bought Interwoven. Open Text (Hummingbird/DocsOpen) is Canadian. The list goes on.

That the American economy is not in worse shape is due in part to the massive investment in US Treasury securities by China.

I guess that leaves Boeing (which is just about holding its own against the European Airbus) and Microsoft. So it looks like the state of Washington is the only place where "made in the USA" is still working.

Talking in the Elevator

Ross Kodner reported a conversation he heard on a train. A lawyer from Foley & Lardner in Milwaukee discussing hiring new attorneys from dissolving firms. Although his point concerns lateral hires in the midst of a deep recession, perhaps a more interesting point concerns public phone conversations as malpractice.

When I first started working in law firms in New York, on of the first things I was told was “never discuss firm business in the elevator -- you never know who may be listening.”

You could think of commuter trains as giant elevators, funneling people into their office. But in this cell phone age, the “don’t talk on the elevator” advice seems to have gone out the window. Everybody has heard people discussing intimate details, giving out credit card numbers, etc. In fact I was once on a train where a woman was loudly giving out her credit card number over her cell phone. Somebody else yelled out “what was that security code again, I want to be sure I got it right” and the car burst into spontaneous applause.

So take an entirely possible scenario. Opposing counsel (or their paralegal, assistant, etc.) overhears a lawyer discussing details of a litigation, merger, what have you. Is that malpractice?  Does the loud-mouth lawyer have any expectation of privacy at all in a crowded railway train?  I should think not. Oh, and Ross -- you should have published the guy’s name.

A New Low in Spam?

Every time there is a big natural disaster, like the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean or hurricane Katrina (although the damage there was predictable and essentially largely man-made), the spammers and scam artists come out with appeals to donate aid – which turns out to be aid to the scam artists.

Now there is something that might well be a new low. I have received a couple of emails from “President Obama” with the subject line “I have Signed the Largest Stimulus Package last Week. Would you like to Get a piece of it. If Yes, Press Here” It turns out to be from “TopSpotBrands” in New York advertising for the “Economic Crisis Grant, LLC” in Orem, Utah at 51 West Center Street #621, Orem, Utah 84057.

It’s hard to assess how low a “new low” has to be, but this is certainly a candidate.

Winning the Civil War

One of my ancestors spent four years (1861-65) in a Union Artillery brigade during the Civil War. We have a large number of his letters home. Most of them are of anecdotal interest (“I wish you would send me a gallon of Bourbon whiskey”). But the following is of significant historical importance, as it demonstrates that Slaves and/or Free Blacks played a significant military role in the eventual victory of the Union.

                    Camp 10 miles before Richmond
                    June 2nd. 1862

“...The second time that we went out we (with part of the fifth New York Zouaves) were sent to destroy a turnpike bridge 200 feet long a half mile inside of the rebel pickets. We went there, tore down the bridge and took one of them prisoner. The third time we went out we would all have been killed or taken prisoner but for the warning of two negroes. There were two regiments of infantry and one masked battery lying in ambush for us on each side of the road. The negroes met us when we had got within a mile of them and told the Col.  We then turned back. The next time we went out we went with Gen. Porter's division and drove the rebels back beyond the Richmond and Harrisburg railroad and took over 500 prisoners. “