Dangerous Death

What is the nightly news doing to the kids that watch? In a
previous post, I talked about the constant miracales and praying
on the local nightly newcast. This week they are asking: "do you
have demons in your life?", last week they featured three pet
psychics reading the mind of their weather-dog. The other
channel, this evening, is interviewing a local alien-watcher.
In the past, I've told children to watch the nightly news to learn
how the national-language is spoken, I can't do this with the local
news, their constant use of cliches and alliteration make them
poor linguistic role models. Their constant use of alliteration:
Dangerous Downpour, Dangerous Divers, and Furious Fire, lead
to the ridiculous day they used: Dangerous Death

Creationist classics

Everyone has heard the creationist classics: the airplain, the
improbability of DNA and humans, and the poor maligned
Bumblebee. All three arguments seem so patently wrong, that
I have wondered why they where not "nipped in the bud" by
some sentient being, before they ever reached the national scene.

An airplane being assembled by the wind blowing through a junk
yard of aircraft parts, is a totally absurd example, it's something,
totally and utterly impossible. You might as well talk about doing
a vasectomy on a unicorn, using the wind. An airplain is an
emergent product of human culture: the frame from metallurgy,
the plastics form chemistry, the interior design from custom and
current fashion. Aerodynamics emerged from enginering,
engineering from modern mathematics, modern mathematics
emerged from the renascence, etc... back into time. A physical
airplain is an artifact, it embodies the history of humans and the
earth itself, it could never be assembled by random means and
the probability of it being assembled in this way has no
mathematical meaning what so ever. This argument doesn't
say anything about evoluation because it doesn't say
anything at all.

The creationists say: DNA and humans should not exist, the
probability of them existing are billions and billions to one.
As usual they have no understanding of probability and much
less evolution, they have things completely backwards.
Humans and DNA have a probability of "one" of existing,
because they do exist, anything that exists has a probability
of one of existing. There are two problems with the creationist
argument:
1. Evolution has no goals, the misconception comes from viewing
the end of a process and assuming that the outcome was the goal
of the process.
2. Probability is not additive, processes only have the probability
at the current time, probabilities do not accumulate with out goals.
We can use the lotto as an example.
If you pick one number out of 15,800,750 in the lotto, you have
set a goal and have one chance of winning in 15,800,750. If the
first number picked is one of your numbers, the probability of you
winning goes up because the probability of that number being
picked has become one. It has been picked, and now exists;
you are now in a lotto with five numbers. As each matching
number is picked the probability changes, so when you win you
will have the probability of one of being the winner, because you
are the winner.
Coin tossing is another example. Each time a coin is tossed there
is a .5 probability for both heads and tails, if you toss the coin five
times, and it comes up heads all five times, it has a probability of
one for that series of tosses occuring, because it did occur, and the
next toss has a .5 chance of coming up heads or tails. If you set five
consecutive heads as your goal, and they do occur, then five
consecutive heads is a one in 3,125 event. Religion has made man
the pinnacle of evolution, not science. Man is the end of a process
not the goal of evolution.

The poor bumblebee, If you want to know how a bumblebee flies,
consult a biologist, not and aeronautical engineer.

Immune system and protein

I've seen estimates, that the immune system can recognize
up to one hundred million chemicals, that is 100,000,000. Not as
large a number as Avagador's number, but, larger then most people
would think. The immune system needs to be this large, because it
has to recognize an immense number of possible chemical
intruders: polypeptides, proteins and polysaccharides, to name
a few.
Let's consider only the polypeptides with a maxium lenght of
10 amino acids: Starting with one amino
acid we would have 20, with two amino acids there would be
20X20 combinations, a total of 400.
Here are the calculations for three through ten amino acids:
20X20X20, 3 amino acids = 8,000
20X20X20X20, 4 amino acids = 160,000
20X20X20X20X20, 5 amino acids = 32,000,000. Get the idea?
6 amino acids = 640,000,000
7 amino acids = 12,800,000,000
8 amino acids = 256,000,000,000
9 amino acids = 5,120,000,000,000
10 amion acids = 10,240,000,000,000
Ten trillion, two hundred and fourty billion; sounds like a
government deficit.
The calculation for all of protien space, up to one thousand is
gigantic! 20 to the 1,000th power, some thing to compare this
number to, which is much smaller, is the number of superstings
in the universe. So, where did the subset of protiens, that now
exist on earth, come from? how were they generated? I think
it is obvious, they could not have been picked at random.
Imagine a lotto where you picked from 20 to the 1,000th power
of numbers, no one would win in billions of years. The proteins
could not have been designed either, they could have only been
produced through complex processes, iterated over billions of
years. Protein shapes are a history of billions of years of chemical
interaction. Proteins have been: cut, chopped, spliced, folded,
added to, and shortened. They've been in the "Bass-O-Matic",
on high speed, for 3 billion years. Don't you think, by now, they
would have developed shape on their own?
Look around, there are beautiful shapes everywhere: beautiful
fractical shaped mountains, beautiful cloud banks, beautiful
river systems, beautiful snowflakes, beautiful protein shapes,
and beautiful people made out of proteins.

A mol of gas

I doubt that anyone can comprehend the actual variety in one mol
of gas. People treat numbers like Avagadro's number; (Avagadro's
number is the number of molecules in a gram molecular weight of a
substance, It's value is 6.025 times 10 to the 23ed power); like
they do the probability of winning the lotto, they don't think about
them in any practical sense. When the lotto was first legalized in
Texas, I calculated that the odds of winning the big prize at one in
15,800,750. People I talked to said, "fine I'll buy a ticket", then I
calculated how far 15,800,750 inches would be, turns out it's
about equal to the distance between Houston and Dallas. Now, my
new argument was: If I place a diamond ring somewhere on a line
between Dallas and Houston and you start walking blindfolded,
what do you think your chances would be of picking up the diamond
ring, with only one try? Well, They still bought tickets and so did I.
But, I could probably sell some lottery tickets even if the chance of
winning the big prize was only one chance in Avagadro's number.

The properties that make the variety in one mol a gas so large are,
infinite direction and the incredable size of Avagadro's number.
written another way, Avagadro's number is,
602,500,000,000,000,000,000,000. Now, neglecting the speed
and spin of the molecules, that give rise to temperature and
pressure, and considering only the direction and number of
molecules, we have a possible number of states in our gas of,
Infinity raised to the power of Avagadro's number.
How does someone go about comprehending the universe when
just one mole of gas has this amount of freedom of motion?

Goals

I feel the need for redirection, or at least direction. I also realize
the need for an understanding of HTML and blogging in general,
I bought an idiot's guide to HTML, I was looking for a dummies
guide, but this title seemed to fit. My URL remains omaga-variety,
variety so large that it is incomprehensible, that will not change.
But, there will be a new emphasize on complexity theory and
complexity theory news, whatever I can glean from the Web.
Why? because this last year I was disappointed by a series on PBS.
It was about the formation of the universe, the solar system,
and life. They described processes to account for the Big-Bang
and the formation of the solar system, but there was no process to
account for the origination of life, all they had on their diagram was
a big "?" under processes. They should have had complex chemical
processes, complexity theory is a maturing science and deserves
to be presented to the public. I suspect that it was held back due to
pressure from, or fear of, the creationist lobby. The longer they can
keep the origination of life a mystery the more likely the general
public will buy their fallacious agrument from ignorence, "no one
knows therefor we are right".
Another change in this blog will be, to bring back at least one basic
principle or definition from my archives for each post. They bare
repeating and well go well with explanations of complex systems.

Spelling and Religion

Why are discussions of spelling and religion so emotionally charged?
The very simple reason is that both subjects are learned at a very
early stage in life, before a child develops an ability to reason
critically. Another reason is that most childhood memories involved
with learning spelling and religion are lost in later life. Do you
remember when religion was first mentioned or the first time that
you tried to spell a word? When ever someone in the academic
community proposes a spelling reform the argument becomes so
emotional the subject is dropped. Here in the United states people
are also becoming more and more resistent to currency changes,
I like the dollar coin but most people don't want to use it. Religion,
spelling, and money will be with us, relatively unchanged, for a long
time.

Mind's eye

What are your mental images? are they the same as they were
when you first learned them in grade school? In 1969, when I
worked for Bell Telephone Laboratories, I entered the restroom
in the western electric plant, and overheard a discussion of the
pending moon landing. One man was telling another that
they should not land on the moon because God lives there. Does
your mental picture of the universe extend past the moon? I
also heard a man say that, " scientists can make life in a test
tube, all they have to do is mix seawater and shit together",
I'll mention that one again when I talk about the origin of life.
There are three images I remember form grade school:

1. A living cell consisted of a spherical membrane with a few
organelles inside.

2. An electron was a small white dot.

3. A proton was a larger black ball.

The images have changed over the last fourty years, they
are much much more complicated now.

Teleportation and the U.S. Airforce

Referring to my last post, if people would use their innate
intelligence to think out what they are proposing, they would come
much closer to touching reality. I'm sure that there are intelligent
people in the airforce, I served 4 years myself, but I heard on the
nightly news, the day before last, that the airforce had
commissioned a study of teleportation, as in startrek, for $25,000
dollars.I would have been glad to tell them why it won't work
for 25 bucks.

(1) The teleportation of an tank by the transfer of information is
impossible because the information that describes a tank is infinite.

(2) The positions and momentums the all the subatomic particals
can't be described because of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

(3) There is no mechanism, at the other end, that could generate
matter and position it, ie...a "tractor beam".

The only way, that I can see that it could be done, is to go into the
underlying superstring network and "cut and paste" a region of
space at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters. But, anything done at
10 to the minus 33 centimeters takes what seems to be an
infinite amount of energy.
The reason this proposal went through was someone confused
science, quantum entanglment at the microscopic level, and
pseudoscience, quantum entanglment applied to an entire tank.
As I have said before in a previous post, the micro world and the
macro world are separate. Micro quantum mechanical princlples
describing the action of one partical can't be applied to objects
in the macro world.
An other argument is, the "all things are posible" argument,
but that is a religious meme and comes under the area a faith.

Intelligent design revisit

Thinking of Intelligent design puts me in a bad mood, anyone who
would seriously entertain this idea has the intelligence of a rock,
traveling through space oblivious to its surroundings.
If Mathematicians can't solve the three body problem, three
bodies of different sizes moving about each other under the
influence of gravity, how could any intelligence design the
movements of 200 billion stars in each of 200 billion galaxies?

Given the problem of designing a circular apparatus that depends
on the value of pi, what value of pi do you use? do you use pi with
10 places to the right of the decimal point, in the equation, 100
places to the right, or even one billion. What accuracy do you use?

How do you design the intentions of 6 plus billion persons? when
each person's brain has 100 billion brain cells with up to one
thousand connections to other cells.That gives a state-space for
the brain cells alown of 1000 to the power of 100 billion. Also, the
brain may use every form of communication between the cells
possible.

How do you design for a gamma ray traveling for billions
of years, coming into the vicinity of the earth, and causing a genetic
change by interacting with a DNA molecule? you don't!

The idea of intelligent disign ranks right up there with the idea of
calculating the future by calculating the trajectory of every particle
in the universe. The universe can't be designed, it is wholly natural
and self-organized, period!

Death

The other night I was trying to think of a new metaphor for life
and death to replace the idea of a lit candle. An electric light
came to mind, it sounds like an old worn out cliche like the candle,
but it works. Turn off the light, unscrew the bulb and smash it on
the floor. The light, of course, is the mind and the bulb is the body,
and there is no afterlife implied because the bulb is destroyed. Even
though I can't visualize smashing a wax candle, I like the metaphor
of the candle because the candle is a natural dissipative system.
When you light a candle the flame self-organizes into a familiar
shape, energy flows from the wax through the active flame and
out as a hot gas of combustion by-products, mostly carbon dioxide
and water. Blow the flame out and you have death, relight it, and
you have the myth of reincarnation.

Nightly religion

I finally got fed up and changed my nightly news channel, they
were constanly using deferential reporting to pander to their
religious audience, and way to much self-promotion. If there
was an accident, they said the survivors survived by miracles,
and they were strangely silent when it came to the dead. I guess
God saved the righteous and killed the unworthy. The dead never
get their chance to defend themselves, if someone claims that
they won a game or survived due to a miracle and I stand up for
the losers or the dead , my wife uses the sacred meme on me, it
seems that I don't have the right to question their personal
beliefs. Recently on the local news there were two fires, one a
private home, where the peope survived miraculously and the
other an empty church, the station made no editorial comments
about the church, except to pray for the congregation and of
course solicit donations.
All this reminds me of a news story a few years ago. A preacher
was told by a city inspector that the brick work on the front of
the church was separating from the building and could fall at
any time and injure someone, the preacher ignored the warning
and did not repair the building. Later the preacher made the
news, just as the preacher, his wife, and I believe daughter,
entered his van the wall came down the killed all three. The
news story was short with condolences, the detail was in news
week magizine. But as all of you know, if the wall would have
come down a few minutes earlier or just as they drove off, we
would still be hearing about the miracle.

Intelligent design and consequences

How can someone believe in intelligent design? vary easily, there
are no consequences to believing in intelligent design. If you were a
primative person living in, say, Borneo close to nature, and you
turned your back on what you had learned from nature and the
use of logic, and followed a belief that said that a Supreme Being
would provide food. How long would you last if you sat around the
table waiting to be fed by a Supreme Being? Not very long! That
belief carried severe consequences. What would happen if some
one denied the laws of the state and ran every red-light as if it
were not there? they wouldn't last long either. What would
happen if an intelligent design electritian, denying the
"electron theory" grabbed a live wire while standing in a puddle
of water? he would not last long. The truth is , people who believe
in intelligent design do respect theories and laws that have
consequences, they do not put their fingers in electrical sockets,
they stop at red-lights, they don't jump off buildings while
thumbing their noses at gravity. The only reason they can preach
intelligent design is the fact that they do not suffer any
consequences.
Evolution is a scientific FACT, proven logically by a proof of
preponderance of evidence. To deny evolution you have to deny
logic, you have to deny physics and the laws of nature, you will have
to deny what you see, feel and hear, because evolution comes from
the study of nature and the real world, where there are
consequences.

Protein state space

How large is the state space of a protein? lets compare the state
space of a protein to the universe. a short time ago I wanted to
see how many superstrings there whould be in the universe, if
each one occupied a cube, 10 to the minus 33 centimeters on
each side. The number of superstrings in a cubic centimeter would
be 1 times 10 to the 99th power, the total number for, a flat
universe, with a radius of 13.7 billion lighy-years, would be 9
times 10 to the 129th power.How look at protein, protein is made
up of 20 different left-handed amino acids, each position along
the molecule can be occupied by one of these 20 amino acids. A
Common large protein could have a primary-structure of 1,000
amino acids, that would give a primary-structure state space of
1 times 20 to the 1,000th power possible proteins. That is much
much larger then the number of superstrings in the universe.
That raises the question of, how did the subset of proteins
involved in life on earth come about? and will we ever discover
the specific proteins involved in the origination of life on the earth?