Using Me!

An open letter to David Cameron

Dear Mr Cameron,

You have come out and stated that you would like to see the UK return to traditional Christian values. At the same time you have said that you are a mostly non-practicing Christian.

My questions to you then are:

1) In what way are you practicing and non-practicing?
2) What kind of Christian are you? CoE? RC? Episcopal? Greek Orthodox? Pentecostal?
3) What exactly do you think the UK could benefit from a Christian Ethic that it could not gain from a secular utilitarian ethic?
4) Do you actually realise that Church attendance is on the wane? Do you realise how large the proportion of the country is that is non-Christian (not even how large the proportion of non-believers are!).
5) You were not elected on a religious agenda (heck you weren’t even elected…). What gives you the right to speak out on religious issues?

Slaves to debt

You and I. Our children. Our grandchildren. Our descendants for as far as you can see. We are all slaves to debt.

Not your credit cards and your insurance policies. Not even your mortgages. Your government debt.

Your government collects taxes from you and then pays for certain services that it has promised to provide. It lays roads. It pays the armed forces. It provides hospitals and libraries and street lighting and everything else you count on them to provide. It pays for the bureaucracy and the administration and the IT and the support and the HR and everything else that makes that work.

Every year the government anticipates that it will receive a certain amount of money in taxes. It then draws up a budget to spend that money. Of course it’s only natural it will miss that target as the economy changes over time. So when they fall short they borrow some money.

The obvious result is that they should pay that money back, with some interest, and next year they get back on track. Except that don’t.

They always spend more than they have coming in. Every major westernised democracy is spending more money every year than they KNOW they will have coming in. They think that this is ok. They do it apparently because they think that the extra expenditure will promote growth in their economy that will more than offset the interest they will have to pay on the extra amounts they borrow. For some reason they think that if they borrow and spend a bit more then it’ll fix itself.

Years go by, decades even, and suddenly a situation has arisen where if the government was to attempt to repay this debt they would have to cut so much money off of the national budget that the entire economy would collapse.

Countries like the UK, USA, Germany and France owe 50%, 60%, 60% or 80% of their total gross national production (per year) in debt. Now bear in mind that the only part of that debt the government gets is the tax and you have governments who owe 3, 4, 5 maybe 10 times their annual income in debt! Add on the interest every year and even if these governments shaved 10% off of their annual budgets (and don’t even try to count how many hospitals would close, streets would go unswept or policemen would lose their jobs) and you’re looking at up to a HUNDRED years or more of problems to get their bank balances balanced!

If you went to the bank and said I’d like to borrow 10 times what I earn and pay it back in a hundred years you’d get laughed out of the door!

Of course a country goes on for longer than you or I can work for but that’s no excuse. In effect these governments are saying that you and I and our children and great great great grandchildren are fine with paying off this debt down the years. Except at no point do they stop and say … you know what? This is never going to get fixed. We have to stop this!

Because debt is increasing faster than the output of these countries the time it would take to balance them with any given level of saving is always increasing. As more time goes by more and more generations of people are being placed into indentured servitude to pay off what people many years before borrowed in order to fail to improve the strength of an ecomony! And of course because everyone’s doing it no one gains anything! If we all just stopped and made a new law – “All government debt is cancelled and government borrowing is now outlawed” – we’d all be JUST AS WELL OFF.

Why? Because our wealth as a nation is dependent on the relative strength of our economy and other economies. Since everyone is borrowing to get one up on the others we all stay the same, barring interventions that would happen anyway (like some entrepreneur comes along and does something awesome).

But someone has to be profiting from all this interest. So who is it?

Well in recent times it is true that the Chinese government has been profiting. By deliberately undervaluing its currency it has been able to sell vast amounts of its own goods around the world generating a surplus of cash for the government in taxes on those goods. Instead of borrowing, the Chinese, lone among all the governments of the world, were saving. Then it bought the debt of other countries. And now we pay them for all those loans.

Well not all. This was going on long before China became a player on the stage. When a government wants to borrow money it issues a bond. Essentially it issues stock certificates in future taxes that it receives. It promises to pay a certain percentage return on these certificates over a period of time. Maybe 2 or 5 or 10 or even 30 years. You pay the government $100 and in 20 years you get $200 back for example. So, apart from China who was buying these? For the most part it’s not other governments – they are all borrowing too although there are bound to be a few other dabblers buying up better interest rate debt than they were issuing – which only leaves one buyer category – individuals and companies.

All that money… it’s going into the pockets of the rich who can afford to buy long term investments.

Now some of you are thinking… but the rich pay higher taxes, so it’s ok! And you are so wrong. In the heyday of the contractor IT market I was exposed to a few tricks of the trade. Perfectly legal tax laws you can use to reduce your taxes. Earning about 100k? You might be in the 40%, 50% or 60% bracket, depending on your country, but your accountant will easily get your gross tax bill down to 25-30%. Earning 250k? Now you’re talking. If you pay over 15% you’re not with the right accountant. And when you start talking millions? Well now you’re offshore, you’re channeling funds left and right, you’re paying under 10% or you’re an exceptionally well principled person.

A quick recap.

Every year some of your taxes go to pay for interest on loans that your government took out based on the security that you would continue to pay taxes.

Your government used this money to grow your economy.

Every year it borrowed more to keep trying to grow the economy.

Every year there was less earned money and more borrowed money propping up your services, your police, your hospitals and so on.

Now the debt is so high that some of those borrowers are concerned they might not get their money back.

But at the same time those governments are so dependent on the borrowed money coming in that they cannot afford to stop borrowing!

Are you willing to accept the long term downturn in your services in order to eliminate your debt? You didn’t sign up for it but the government did on your behalf.

Are you willing to write to your MP or Senator and demand an end to this debt financed society? Do you really need that new nuclear submarine? Do you really need that new traffic calming scheme? Ultimately the money has been spent on buying your votes but at a cost that was never revealed to you. We will put more police on the streets! Well will open more hospitals! We will maintain our nuclear deterrent! Oh and we will be paying your taxes for the next 10 or 20 years towards it and have less to spend on the things we promised you!

Yes it would cause a major shift in wealth and a major shift in world power even but in 10 or 20 years your governments could get out of debt and start spending only the money it actually owned. Then everything would settle down and return to normal.

Actually there is something to blog about…

This may only be of interest to those in the UK but this has been bothering me for weeks, since the story broke.

Kenneth Clarke MP was accused by the press of making a delineation between types of rape. They claim he described some rapes as more serious than others. They ‘raped’ him in the press over it. They and the opposition demanded his resignation. Both are utterly wrong.

Mr Clarke MP was on a radio show defending his proposal that if defendants were to plead guilty at the start of a trial they could get lower sentences than those people found guilty of the same crime who pleaded innocent.

In this radio show he expressed the view that the average sentencing for rapists was distorted because the figures included those of young men found guilty of statutory rape. That is to say that the figures the interviewer brought to bear included the sentences handed down to 16 and 17 year old having consensual sex with their partners, where those partners were 15 years old.

This is an entirely valid point. A guilty verdict for statutory rape for a 16 year old male with a 15 year old female are short, in consensual circumstances. They have absolutely nothing to do with sentencing of forced rape perpetrators. His point was that if you only consider the forced rape perpetrators the sentencing is much stricter than the overall average. His interviewer though, Victoria Derbyshire of Radio 5, could not see this point on the spot and stated that “rape is rape”.

Thus the entire argument ensued.

No Rape is not Rape. Consensual sex between two people, one of whom is under age is NOT the same as forced sex between two parties. Ken’s only point was that if you reduced the average sentence of the latter category offenders, if they admitted the offence up front, it would still be a substantial time in prison. And he was right.

The press, as always, seized upon the story, and Mr Clarke is not to blame… they are.

What is this blog about?

Over the past few months I have taken more than a passing interest in the Skeptics Guide to the Universe. In it Dr. Steve Novella has espoused on more than one occasion that the best, most successful blogs find a niche and settle into it. But what niche could I ever hope to settle in to? I could never blog about neuroscience like he does, I’m not an expert in politics or biology, or anything really. I’m not even an expert in my degree subject of Physics. I’m just a guy who lives his life by scientific rules.

You make a hypothesis, you test the hypothesis and that hypothesis lives and dies by its proof.

And that’s pretty much how I judge the entire world.

And thus I blog about things that don’t pass the test.

It’s not a nice niche but it’s something. I couldn’t contain myself to just blog about economics or chemistry, or teen-angst or religion. I set this blog up to vent about the vacuous stupidity of those who claim faith but then I found that there was equal invalidity in politics or science or whatever. I cannot resist!

If there’s one thing this blog is about it’s stupidity…. but please remember it’s subjective. My posts about quantum mechanics are purely from a layman’s perspective (allbeit one with a Physics degree). If it doesn’t make sense, if it isn’t intuitive, if it is plain STUPID I will blog about it, given enough time.

So how long will it take me to find something stupid today? Counting now… even with my limited bandwidth where I currently am…

Aha… found my first stupidity in 15 seconds, but I can’t blog it as it would prejudice my divorce trial.

I can’t find, right now (can’t be loading Al Jezeera from here or I’ll go mad) a decent story, but let us be content to know that across the world the middle east unrest is being reported from every conceivable angle. There is only one correct angle. Which is it? I’d love to know.

Content? What content?!

Ok… I am so sorry there hgave been no updates for such a long time but… life. You know how it is?

Just a few posts ago I was a single guy with nothing to bother him. Then I got married. Then I had a son! Amazing stuff!

Unfortunately my marriage took a turn for the worse and I’m going through a divorce now. I cannot comment on it still but one day I am sure I will have plenty to say about born again christians, the child support agency, the courts and much nore.

For now though let me leave you with the greatest, the bestist, the only… MOnty Python:

Too much white noise!

I am incredibly fed up of hearing meaningless dialogues and monologues from the press and politicians lately. Whether it’s about student funding, student protests, the budget, the economy or any other topic gracing the headlines of late there seems to be a complete lack of balance and an utter absence of any rational voices.

Then I read this brilliant piece of writing about journalism. It says so much about so many of these topics and more without saying more than is necessary. Each sentence of it could be the topic of entire essays. It’s a political amuse-bouche to get the brain thinking.

I give you “The war you don’t see”.

How to persuade an Atheist to Become a Christian

I couldn’t help but post this little tidbit.

A friend sent me a link to an article on persuading Atheists to become Christians. I had a quick read through and I had to point this paragraph out:

An atheist will want definite evidence, not just a rehearsal of your faith. You’ll have to provide concrete facts and scientifically thought out arguments, although do not focus on those too much; our beliefs based on faith, Christian love and joy of worship (all immaterial things), are not evidence to the unbeliever. In fact, a reliance on faith may be evidence to the atheist that you aren’t relying on facts.

No shit Sherlock!!

Plenty more nonsense through the link.

TAM London 2010

So TAM London is over for another year. Overall I enjoyed the weekend but I think I enjoyed the parts that were free more than the bits I paid for.

In comparison to last year the event was much bigger but with more delegates (c.1000 vs c.400) came some problems. The venue was not as good. The auditorium was just a large room which meant all the seating was on the same level rather than tiered as it was in 2009. That meant a lot of people straining to see over or around those in front. The seats themselves were also very narrow, making the discomfort of the long sessions overbearing. As the room was not an auditorium per se the light and sound rigging wasn’t up to scratch either.

The food distribution was also chaotic. Firstly it involved 1000 people traipsing up and down three flights of stairs and secondly it wasn’t remotely as good as last year. Far too much about presentation than content! And I hear that vegetarians were really badly catered for.

And that was all the space we had in the hotel. i.e. there was no particular space for stands and stalls. They were just wedged into the foyer spaces between those two halls.

Drinks in the hotel were also a complete rip-off. £4.70 for a pint at the bar and £4.80 (!) for a CAN of beer at the Saturday evening gig.

And then there was the ‘Green Room’. Unlike last year the speakers for the most part retired out of the way between sessions limiting the opportunities for the delegates to mingle with them and to get autographs.

But most of all there were the sessions themselves. I tried to enjoy the talks for what they were but nearly all of them fell into three categories. Preaching (DJ!), Irrelevant (Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie) or Content-less. Richard Dawkins really there was NOTHING in your talk! Why didn’t you talk to us about your work in evolutionary biology or of what you achieved during your time in the position of the Charles Simonyi Professorship in the Public Understanding of Science? The best talk of the weekend was from Sue Blackmore who actually told us about her work and her story of Believer to Skeptic. Where were the informative and entertaining talks that we had last year from Phil Plait, Brian Cox and Ben Goldacre?

And when I say there was preaching there really was, mostly from DJ Groethe. You are talking to Free Thinkers. We do not want to be preached at! Please do tell us about upcoming events and campaigns but you can do that in 5 minutes and then move on to telling us more INFORMATION. Heck, as the new President of the JREF if you ran out of information in 5 minutes then let us ask you about our thoughts and concerns.

What I really enjoyed was the social time spent with friends from last year and making new acquaintances. What I really enjoyed was bumping into David Deutsch again and getting to thank him for his pointers last year. What I really enjoyed was spending an hour in the bar with Tim Minchin.

On the Tim Minchin subject it was unfair to brand the evening gig as ‘Tim Minchin and friends’ and then for him to only perform 3 songs. Clearly he wasn’t to blame for this as he was evidently exhausted. But it could have been branded as an Amateur Transplants gig with special guests including Tim.

So for next year let’s have a better venue with a proper auditorium. Let’s have decent food. Let’s have it organised so it doesn’t take the entire comfort break to get to the coffee, drain your cup and get back to the hall. Let’s have more informative talks and less preaching. Let’s have more time for questions. Let’s NOT have any more speakers who don’t belong at a Skeptics conference.

Quantum Mechanics, Consciousness, Reality and Computation – Part V

So in this series of posts I have not yet addressed the word in my title … ‘Computation’.

To cut a long story short, it seems to me that what Quantum Mechanics does is what any computer programmer would do when faced with an enormous amount of information that he could not possibly compute in a sensible timeframe.

Why track every particle in the universe if it only matters where it is when you need to know about it?

Could the interference patterns caused by single particles be the result of approximations in the computational algorithms of the universe?

Put it this way… if the universe was in some way ‘pure’. If it existed arbitrarily, independent of anything else, then why would time and space be quantized? Are Xeno’s paradoxes for real? If time and space were not indivisible then I would claim that Xeno’s paradoxes would NOT be paradoxical IF the universe were ‘pure’ and ‘free’ because a smooth calculation over ANY interval would be possible. The paradoxes ONLY become paradoxical if you have to make the calculations! If nothing needs to do any calculations then yes you CAN integrate from 0 to 1 in a finite time. It is ONLY if something has to work something out that an un-quantized space or time will never complete an integral.

So, in the way that I see it, the Universe really works like an enormous computer. There are a huge number of locations, but they are discrete. One planck volume each. And a huge number of times, but discrete. One planck time each. At each time each volume contains information. Nothing more.

And my idea is testable! I learned this in my degree when simulating the n-body problem.

Take two bodies that are falling towards each other under gravity. As they get closer together they get faster and faster. Any computer program that simulates this over discrete time periods will eventually reach a point where the bodies are really close together and the forces on them are enormous, so the accelerations are enormous and so their new velocities are enormous. After one more time period they have passed each other and are racing away at stupendous speeds. You just violated conservation of energy. So you step back one step and you move forwards by a smaller period of time. Now the forces, accelerations and velocities get even higher. And no matter how small you make your unit of time you always face a point where things break down. Even at the planck scale of time and distance conservation of energy will be violated.

So we have a position where either planck scales are real or they are simply descriptive in terms of quantum uncertainty. You can test by conservation of energy which is the case. It may be beyond our detection abilities at the moment but the test is there. If we could prove that energy is not conserved then we would know that time and space are genuinely discrete and therefore we COULD describe the universe as a set of information which is really just like a computer model. Or we would show that energy is conserved and that therefore the planck scales are simply descriptive of our ability to describe the universe using observation. Indeed a place between unit 0 and unit 1 on the planck scale would exist. In which case quantum theory would appear to break down. In fact Xeno would come back to haunt us. After all if you need to make an infinite number of calculations to move an infinitesimal step forward in time and space you could never get anywhere. After all even the tiniest change in the universe requires the propagation of that change to everywhere else in the universe, allbeit at the speed of light of less. In a smooth scaled universe any change, no matter how small, requires an infinite number of propagations of the changes – as per Xeno.

In a way, if I follow this argument to its logical conculsion I have to ask myself again : Why does a single photon interfere with itself in Young’s Double Slit experiment? If I follow this path then the answer is that it does so because the universe doesn’t know where the photon is and therefore it does pass through both slits and that it is not because of interference with another universe where everything is identical except that the photon went a different way. After all where the bloody hell ARE all these other universes? That’s the hardest question for the multiverse proponents to answer! Myself included!

One answer would be to conclude that the universe itself is a quantum computer but then it would have to exist inside some container which leads to infinite regression.

I’m not happy with any of the answers. How CAN a photon go through both slits? Yet how CAN there be an infinite number of universes (or rather a very very large number representing each possible quantum state)?

I suspect the answer is far more subtle than any of us can realise. I do not want to shed the idea that our universe is mechanistic although including a lack of knowledge that we call the WaveForm, but neither do I wish for a plethora of universes constantly being created.

So it would be so easy just to say the universe is a computer program. But then it’s got to be running somewhere on something and we have to wonder about the rules of the universe in which that computer exists. If that universe was singular and purely mechanistic with not even the concept of a wave-form then where would they come up with that idea from? Indeed without the mechanisms of quantum mechanics what would existence even be like? Everything we know relies on quantum mechanics. Take it away and you are left with a reality that we could not even begin to describe. Could anyone come up with a way to describe a self contained computer that conforms to everything we know? After all… there is such a thing as a wave function that describes the entire universe and if it can be conceptualised (although not solved) inside that universe would it require a larger universe to contain it?

Quantum Mechanics is the most confusing thing human endeavour has EVER come up with.

I believe it was Feynman who said “If you think you understand Quantum Mechanics then you don’t understand Quantum Mechanics.”

Jehovah’s witnesses at my door

So yesterday two Jehovah’s witnesses came to my house whilst I was out front having a smoke. I took the time to talk to them while I finished my cigarette and my cup of tea. It was quite fun.

I made it clear when they asked right at the start that I was an Atheist who had once been a Christian so we had a solid understanding of our starting points. Their first question to me was how I felt about the recent comments from scientists about God in the media. I immediately felt that they did not actually know what was being said by whom especially when they couldn’t remember Richard Dawkins’ name and for the fact that it was actually Hawking who made the press this week with his belief that M-Theory closes the gaps that he said MIGHT exist in ‘A Brief History of Time’. So I didn’t lambaste them for this I merely stated that I broadly agreed with them.

So instead they asked me why I didn’t believe in God. I decided to go with something simple and stated infinite regression as one reason. Unfortunately they couldn’t grasp the idea that if you decide to complicate matters by requiring a God to create a universe then you can equally require a god to create the god and so on… They were quite sure that the God who created this universe doesn’t require a creator. I was getting nowhere so I didn’t even try invoking Occam’s Razor which would just have confused them further.

The lady who was leading the conversation from ‘their’ side pressed me on the fact that God’s word is there for you to see in the bible. I did not mention that their God only represents a tiny proportion of the people on the planet although when pressed I did point out that their version of truth is only as old and only as reliable as the versions espoused by other people. However I did point out repeatedly that this bible was concocted by the Roman Catholic church during various councils from a MUCH larger canon that already existed at the time. They both seemed entirely unaware of the existence of other forms of christianity and neither of them had read any of the other gospels which exist.

In fact they went so far as to say that through God’s influence the proper content of the bible had been formed despite being ignorant of the fact that other versions had existed. I even told them that gnostic christianity seemed much more appealing to me. A religion based on enlightenment seems far more appropriate than one based on sin. Again they had no answer.

When I pressed them on contradictions in the bible they demanded that I find one. Since I didn’t have one at my immediate recall, although there are dozens, I turned the conversation to rules in the bible. I asked if they ate pork or shellfish and when they said yes I pointed out that both are disallowed in the old testament. They said that times had changed and that the bible had to be interpreted in the times we live in. I pointed out that the bible doesn’t say ‘Thou shalt not eat shellfish until such time as you have invented the refrigerator’ and they seemed to shrug this off as inconsequential. They made some mention of the ‘law on blood’ hasn’t changed because it was ‘renewed in the new testament’ and therefore ‘is valid’. In which case why not ignore the WHOLE old testament???

I was really close to asking whether they went to church when they had their periods since the same parts of the O.T. mention not allowing your women to go when they are menstruating but I didn’t want to be offensive to that degree!

I asked them by what mechanism that hypothesised God could work in the Universe since he is outside of it. Indeed I challenged them. They claimed that God works in the world so I claimed that therefore there must be a mechanism that he does so by. Therefore one can hypothesise what that mechanism is and scientists can test it. They quite simply did not understand, even when I promised that if they came up with this hypothesis and proved it then I would accept everything they said.

To move things on a bit I then suggested that in order to be a Christian one would have to have genuine free will. I told them that I was a materialist and that they must be dualists or pluralists. Therefore a simple proposition for them would be to provide a testable hypothesis by which the mechanism of dualism or pluralism could be proven. By this point both looked ready to leave.

And with a few words about how no-one can do anything without hope and how we were clearly ‘coming at the debate from opposite sides’ the Jehovah’s Witnesses gave up and left me to my sin and my damnation.

Next please!!