My friend Matt at Dancing in the Minefields posted such a great link in the comments the other day that I had to give it a post all its own. It’s an animation that helps you visualize how ten dimensions would work. I will probably have to watch it a couple of times to really wrap my head around it, but it’s pretty simple, you know, considering the subject.

Watch it: Imagining the Tenth Dimension

The author of the book that the video is based on, Rob Bryanton, also has a blog.

For the skeptics, here is a forum thread “debunking” the video. I don’t know enough about all of this to judge who is right, but maybe you will find it informative.

The Washington Post reports that Verizon has been turning over customers’ cell phone records to the federal government, without court orders. That means that all the FBI had to do was ask nicely.

This incident is illustrative of the purposes for which people use their personal power. Someone at Verizon is voluntarily giving this information to the government. Someone receives the request and makes the data transfer. Maybe that person really believes in the government’s authority to spy on the populace without a warrant. I think it’s more likely that that person “is just doing his job”.

I am also interested in the legality of this whole thing. Could Verizon customers sue? According to the Washington Post:

Carriers are facing a raft of lawsuits from individuals and privacy advocates, such as the EFF and the American Civil Liberties Union, for allegedly violating Americans’ privacy by aiding the NSA’s warrantless surveillance program.

The federal government has intervened, arguing that to continue the case would divulge “state secrets,” jeopardizing national security.

The Senate Intelligence Committee could draft a bill this week that includes relief for the carriers. The administration is seeking blanket immunity, which would extend to anyone sued for assisting the government — not just telecom carriers — in its post-Sept. 11 surveillance programs.

Yikes. A bill like the one described above would mean that companies would not have to fear reprisals for handing out clients’ personal information. So since a warrant is no longer required and companies may no longer be required to honor their contracts, the only barrier between the federal government and your information would be personal power. A company would have to take a stand and refuse to give up the data without a court order. Since Google knows pretty much everything about me (and you), let’s hope it lives up to its promise not to be evil and others follow suit.

There is a resolution coming up for vote in the House of Representatives to officially declare the Armenian genocide by the Ottoman Empire, a genocide. Considering that this happened 90 years ago, I was wondering why Congress has suddenly decided it’s time for this resolution.

Congressman George Radanovich cleared everything up in this interview with Tucker Carlson.

Radanovich said, “We’re doing this to benefit the Turks.”

Make of that what you will.

Radanovich represents Fresno, CA (19th district), historically home to a large Armenian population.

Here is a neat article from the Telegraph about a scientist named Itzhak Bars who claims to have discovered two new dimensions, one in space and one in time. He claims that the second dimension of time would resolve the grandfather paradox:

Bars first found hints of an extra time dimension in M-theory in 1995 and, when he looked into it, discovered the grandfather paradox and other fears could be overcome by using a new kind of symmetry - a mathematical property to work out the relationship between the quantities of position and momentum. It is this symmetry that might help reconcile the two mighty pillars of 20th-century physics, quantum mechanics and relativity.

For those who don’t know, the grandfather paradox is a time-travel problem that seems to allow you to go back in time and kill your own grandfather, thereby preventing your own birth. I would really like to hear the explanation of how he resolves the paradox.

Later in the article, the reporter wonders if this is all just hypothetical:

The work poses a question: is his proposal a mathematical fix, rather than a real physical entity?

Bars insists his extra dimensions are more than mathematical sleight of hand. “Absolutely not,” he told New Scientist. “These extra dimensions are out there, as real as the three dimensions of space and one of time we experience directly.”

There are some very interesting points in the comments from the article:

There’s a saying: You can’t step in the same river twice. You can try to step in at a specific point that you think you know, but water has passed between your previous ‘knowledge’ of that spot and now. No two attempts will ever produce the same result. So if you went back to shoot your grandfather, you may not even find him because you’ll already be in an alternate universe. And if you do shoot him you are only possibly preventing another version of ‘you’ from being born.

I liked this guy’s point. I have no idea if it has any scientific merit, but it make sense to me. For the scientists out there, here is a link to Itzhak Bars’ paper, which was over my head. If you can explain it to me, I would appreciate it.

You’ll never guess (well, maybe you will) who said this about a unipolar global ideology and one world government:

However, what is a unipolar world? However one might embellish this term, at the end of the day it refers to one type of situation, namely one centre of authority, one centre of force, one centre of decision-making.

It is world in which there is one master, one sovereign. And at the end of the day this is pernicious not only for all those within this system, but also for the sovereign itself because it destroys itself from within.

And this certainly has nothing in common with democracy. Because, as you know, democracy is the power of the majority in light of the interests and opinions of the minority.

It’s Vladimir Putin! Now, I’m not a fan of Russia and I’m not sure how much Putin knows about democracy, but when he directed this speech at America, I think he was right. We only get ourselves in trouble by assuming one system is right for everyone, everywhere. Sometimes our opponents can tell us things we’re not prepared to tell ourselves.

So Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize. Maybe I’m confused, isn’t it supposed to be for work relating to peace?

I did a little research. According to the Nobel Foundation’s bio of Alfred Nobel:

Nobel’s will was hardly longer than one ordinary page. After listing bequests to relatives and other people close to him, Nobel declared that his entire remaining estate should be used to endow “prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit to mankind.”

That doesn’t sound like it is restricted to peace related work, really it could be anything. That’s why there are prizes given in multiple fields: Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature, Economics and Peace. Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change were awarded the Peace Prize:

“for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change”

That explanation still has nothing to do with peace. Regardless of your views on the veracity of An Inconvenient Truth and climate change, it is an environmental issue. Spreading the word about global warming is not peace work. I am totally baffled as to how this could be justified.

Salon has a dubious explanation and these people are thrilled, but I’m still not convinced.

I guess the Economist sums it up best:

Evidently the committee has decided to redefine the award as the Nobel Prize for Making the World a Better Place in Some Unspecified Way. In that case, Al Gore and the IPCC seem pretty good—though controversial—choices. The IPCC has put together scientific knowledge on the subject in a form comprehensible to policymakers; Mr Gore has pushed the policymakers to take action.

I found something interesting today. The US government publishes a number of RSS feeds from a variety of departments. The directory can be found here.

G-Dub also has his own collection of feeds.

Many thanks to David Brooks at the New York Times for yesterday’s Op-Ed piece on the post-adolescent, pre-adult phase many of us 20-somethings seem to find ourselves in:

During this decade, 20-somethings go to school and take breaks from school. They live with friends and they live at home. They fall in and out of love. They try one career and then try another.

Their parents grow increasingly anxious. These parents understand that there’s bound to be a transition phase between student life and adult life. But when they look at their own grown children, they see the transition stretching five years, seven and beyond. The parents don’t even detect a clear sense of direction in their children’s lives. They look at them and see the things that are being delayed.

Don’t worry, parents. According to Mr. Brooks, we’ll grow out of it:

What we’re seeing is the creation of a new life phase, just as adolescence came into being a century ago. It’s a phase in which some social institutions flourish — knitting circles, Teach for America — while others — churches, political parties — have trouble establishing ties.

Maybe this helps to explain why Ron Paul is so popular out here on the internets. Technically, he is a Republican, but he is clearly not sticking to the party line. I hope that his popularity marks a real shift, rather than a passing phase. If the Millennial generation continues its support for liberty and new voices in politics, we could see big changes by the time I’m 40.

Yesterday we went to see the documentary Buddha’s Lost Children. It was a powerful film about Khru Bah, Thai boxer turned Buddhist monk who cares for orphaned and abandoned boys in northern Thailand.

Khru Bah is an inspirational person; he loves the children and he loves his work. The monastery where the children and Khru live is also home to 120 horses that the children learn to care for. Khru Bah teaches the boys life skills through hard work and discipline. Everyone contributes to the operations of the monastery. Khru Bah gives the boys hope by showing them that they are each special and capable of great things.

I especially liked the movie because Khru Bah was taking definite action to make changes in the world. One of my frustrations with Buddhism is that it sometimes seems to advocate withdrawing from the world rather than rolling up one’s sleeves and working on it. Khru Bah shows a good balance of action and non-action. He leads the boys on 100km trek to rebuild an old temple, but also teaches meditation. The boys are also trained as Thai boxers and many are covered in tattoos. Khru Bah is not the Buddhist monk I had pictured in my mind.

I think that Khru Bah’s story shows that when you are really driven to do something, you can accomplish it with whatever methods you have available. Khru Bah was a boxer, so he uses boxing to teach the boys life lessons. His methods may be unconventional, but they certainly seem to have good results. Khru Bah’s life shows that there are many paths to fulfillment and transformations are possible.

Here is the trailer for the film. It’s very cheesy, the film was not. It doesn’t appear to be on Netflix, but keep an eye out.

Our friend Steve posted this quote from a Richard Dawkins article on his blog:

Religion changes, for people, the definition of good. Atheists and humanists tend to define good and bad deeds in terms of the welfare and suffering of others. Murder, torture, and cruelty are bad because they cause people to suffer. Most religious people think them bad, too, but some religions (for example the religion of the Taliban) sanction all of them under some circumstances. For non-religious people, the behavior of consenting adults in a private bedroom is the business of nobody else, and is not bad unless it causes suffering - for example by breaking up a happy family. But many religions arrogate to themselves the right to decide that certain kinds of sexual behavior, even if they do no harm to anyone, are wrong.

The actions of the Taliban, their vile bullying of women, their sanctimonious hatred of all that might lead to enjoyment, their violence, their ignorant bigotry, their hatred of education, their cruelty, seem to me to be as close to pure evil as anything I can imagine. Yet, by the lights of their own religion they are supremely righteous %96 really good people.

Dawkins is a prominent atheist who alledges that religion can cause people to do evil things.
Is it a coincidence that the source of the quote is this Washington Post On Faith series from which I just sent an article by Sam Harris to Laura? When I read the Dawkins article, I immediately thought, “What about Stalin? What about Hitler?” They were two infamous atheists who did evil things, some might argue they did them because they were atheists. Here’s what Sam Harris has to say about it:

How many times are we going to have to counter the charge that Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot represent the endgame of atheism? I’ve got news for you, this meme is not going away… I can assure you that this bogus argument will be with us for as long as people label themselves “atheists.” And it really convinces religious people. It convinces moderates and liberals. It even convinces the occasional atheist.

I like Sam Harris. He advocates changing the dialogue by dropping the label of “atheist”:

I think that “atheist” is a term that we do not need, in the same way that we don’t need a word for someone who rejects astrology. We simply do not call people “non-astrologers.” All we need are words like “reason” and “evidence” and “common sense” and “bullshit” to put astrologers in their place, and so it could be with religion.

I would like to take this idea one step further and suggest that religious people drop their labels as well. How often do you meet a someone that says, “I’m a Christian, but I don’t believe X, Y and Z.” If you are constantly qualifying the label you’ve given yourself, maybe it’s time to drop the label.

Here is a conversation I had once:

Jimmy: What religion are you?

Emily: I’m no religion.

Jimmy: You can’t be no religion.

Emily: Yes, I can. What religion are you?

Jimmy: I’m Baptist.

Emily: And what do Baptists believe that makes them different from other Christians?

Jimmy: I don’t know.

Emily: Then how can you be Baptist?

Admittedly, Jimmy was not the brightest guy I’ve ever met, still you can see how the label superseded any system of beliefs he had. He might not know what it meant, but he was BAPTIST, by God!

The same thing happens with some atheists. They become so enamored of not believing that they sort of turn into vacuums. They claim atheisim as a belief more fervently than many religious people claim their God. But what is it they believe in? Nothing. Kind of like Jimmy, the Baptist.