"… of shoes and ships and sealing wax/ of cabbages and kings.",  Lewis Carroll

George Rebane

(Written 31mar12; no time to write today Sunday, I'm pulling my scheduled club duty as rangemaster at the local rifle/pistol range.)

On this blustery and wet Saturday morning I gathered together a few of the piles of notes I make while reading the stuff that arrives across the (virtual and real) transom here on our Nevada County ridge.  They seemed to have a common thread if you don’t put too fine a point on it.

For openers, I enjoyed the latest contribution from Lucille Lovestedt in today’s Other Voices column of The Union (paywalled online).   That lady is a keen observer of the human condition, and a practiced friend of the written word.  Among other things on her mind these days is her more frequent run-ins in the news with the concept of Singularity (q.v. 'Singularity Signposts' category), which she interprets as the harbinger of human “obsolescence” if not outright “extinction”.  Of course, as readers here know, she has a point on both counts.  One of the Singularity preparations of this soon-to-be great-great-grandmother is to update her will accordingly to at least account for the ‘obsolescence’ scenario, which is already in full swing in the developed nations’ labor markets.  I would dearly like to know some of the particulars of her revised will; that would be a worthy read from this well-read and wise woman who has enjoyed many birthdays.

In the current (April 2012) issue of Scientific American, Columbia biology professor Stuart Firestein laments that the shoreline of human knowledge is expanding at a disquieting pace, a pace which drives people in science and engineering to specialize in ever narrower parts of this magnificent beachfront.  As a retired worker in those same vineyards, I have experienced that identical panic since getting my masters in control and estimation way back in 1968, and realizing that I would have to be a lifelong student – for me school would never be out.

Firestein’s correct prophylactic for frustration is to accept that for STEM workers “ignorance will always grow faster than knowledge”, since the successful answer to every question raises ten more unanswered ones.  The course to contentment here lies in cultivating a “high-quality ignorance”, one that the great James Clerk Maxwell described as a “thoroughly conscious ignorance (which) is a prelude to every real advance in knowledge.”  To me such ignorance is best expressed in properly picking the next question the answer to which will advance human knowledge to the greatest extent given the resources at hand.  Every STEM careerist is motivated by the handful of such questions currently in his pocket.  (STEM = science, technology, engineering, math.  Firestein’s German ancestors undoubtedly arrived as Feuersteins on these shores.  I wonder why the Americanization of the family name was halted in mid stride, and not completed to Firestone.)

Speaking of learning rapidly expanding knowledge, the advent of multi-media ebooks is now being hailed as the new darling of STEM education.  Today’s educators are also concerned about the ability of STEM texts to keep young people engaged.  They may have a point, but my experience does not include disengagement due to a poor text.  It was raw curiosity in the topic/subject/question that made us dig up other sources if the text did not adequately serve.  But in today’s age of awesome graphics, short attention spans, and instant gratification (also 'if I ain't learnin', it's someone else's fault'), it may take more to titillate the little darlins.

My real concern about such ebooks is in their current ability to accept reader annotations.  All (at least STEM) students have experienced the ‘aha! moment’ at various times when reading a technical text, and then immediately making the appropriate annotations in the book that will make the ‘aha!’ handy to reprise in the coming years.  It is a library filled with such books that have truly become the extension of your own mind that make for a productive career in science and engineering.  Today, that ability to easily include such marginal scribbles, diagrams, underlinings, and highlights is still not there, but it is coming (soon with audio snippets added).  Until then we must be careful not to stop killing trees prematurely.

Elsewhere in these pages I have commented on the apparent variability in the information carrying capacity of (spoken) languages.  For example, what was attempted in the introduction of Ebonics as the formal language of the black ghettos was as inefficient as the use of ‘the blue of the grass’ for the color green in some Bantu languages, as opposed to the specific labels for the several distinct types of ice and snow that were important to northern aboriginals, and so reflected in their language(s).

Now we hear of research at the University of Lyon in France that studied the information rate of various languages while recognizing that “some languages sound faster than others”.  Their results showed that even though Japanese and Spanish, at about 7.8 syllables/second, were the fastest (English at 6.4), all the major languages conveyed information at approximately the same rate.  Unfortunately, the conclusion about information carrying capacity of the studied languages was not strongly drawn.  Admittedly, it is a politically sensitive subject.

My druthers would be for the adoption of Loglan or Lojban (q.v.) as the new lingua franca of earth.  I think that would contribute enormously to peace, wealth-creating commerce, human knowledge, and widespread increase in the quality of life.

Finally, yet another skeptical scientist has weighed in on the validity of global warming models.  In the 27mar12 WSJ, Princeton physics professor Dr William Hopper takes the same tack I have been preaching here for the last several years on the ability of large computer models to reliably predict the (synoptic) performance of a complex dynamic and stochastic system such as the earth’s climate in outyears that range over a half century into the future.  That they don’t successfully account for recent observable (topical) performance in retrodicting such things as global temperatures and CO2 levels is the point at which Hopper begins his excellent critique.

In these pages, my global warming skepticism, especially including the anthropogenic kind, has been from the synoptic perspective of the systems sciences.  While there is overlap, others like Anthony Watts (Watts up with that) and our own Russ Steele (NC2012) report regularly on the topical evidence that keeps rolling in to support global warming skepticism.  (see 'Our Links' in right margin)