Why Gay Rights Matter

At the outset I’d like to say that I’m not gay.  None of my friends are gay, and I don’t have any gay family members.  This issue has little to no impact on me personally, but there are many people out there who feel alienated and abandoned in a so called “free” society just because of ignorance, stupidity, and bigotry.

I’d like to tell all of you a story about the inventor of the modern computer.  Meet Alan Turing.


The man was not only a genius but a hero as well.  During World War II, he built an early computer which cracked Nazi codes and literally saved the free world.  But there was one problem — he was gay in a world which would not accept that.

After admitting having had sexual relations with another man, he was convicted of “gross indecency” and given two options.  He could go to prison or take female hormonal injections to cure his supposed inordinate libido.  He went with the latter and began to develop breasts and other female attributes.  Falling into a deep depression, he laced an apple with cyanide and committed suicide at the age of 41, next to one of the computers he helped create.

Turing was literally murdered by his own society simply for being who he was, after liberating people who were being murdered for who they were.  Talk about irony.

So next time you’re on the computer playing video games, surfing the internet, or texting on your fancy iPhone, remember that the core principles governing how they work were created by a tortured gay man who had to commit suicide because the world would not accept him.  Remember his tragic story and think of how much we lost.  Had he lived a longer life, I’m sure he would have had many more things to add.

A CERN Physicist’s View On Free Will

Do we have free will?  Many would like to believe so, but considering our brains are made of atoms, the same stuff as everything else in the universe, and atoms follow the laws of physics, does that leave any room for free will?  We could try to invoke the weirdness of quantum mechanics, but to a physicist who actually understands quantum laws, does the idea make any sense?  No, not really.

In the video below, CERN physicist Dr. Russell Stannard asks if we are really free to choose.

When I first studied quantum mechanics, I had this very problem of free will running through my mind. I hoped to find an open door for freedom.  I didn’t find it.  All I found was chance.  It’s like if I wrote a computer algorithm to simulate this reality, I would use a randomize function to determine what happens at very small scales.  It’s a bit disheartening to discover that we’re not in the least bit control over our lives or what happens to us.  Life’s a sort of strange movie.

I tell myself that I might be missing something, but all evidence suggests that free will is not there.  And it’s not something you have to deduce from physics.  If you actually carefully look into people’s brains when they’re making a decision (and you know what you’re looking for), you can tell them what they’re going to do long before they’re even conscious of having made the decision.

But if reality is just this physical process which is happening on its own, the next question is why we’re aware of it at all.  For some strange reason, my brain activity “encodes” my personal subjective consciousness.  So here I am, watching this universe unfold from the front row seat of my body.  Am I the only one who’s conscious?  Not likely.  How about animals?  Insects?  When I squash a bug, did it feel pain and suffer?  Or what if I’m doing some yard work in my garden and accidently cut a worm in half?  Which half is suffering?  There is no significant “brain” in that worm, they’re more a network of nerves.

I find it all rather intriguing and bizarre.  Dr. Stannard made another video on consciousness, and he shares the perspective I think many of us physicists share.

Maybe the questions of consciousness and free will lie at the boundaries of the knowable, as Dr. Stannard suggests?  I’ve been thinking about them for years, and I can’t make any progress either.   All I end up doing is mental gymnastics which leave me in an uncomfortable, contorted state of mind.  And then when I finally figure out my initial errors and bad assumptions, straightening myself back out, I”m right back where I started, having made little to no progress.

Wealth and Prosperity

What is the cause of the wealth of nations?  Adam Smith examined the question centuries ago, yet we’re still trying to figure out how we can lift people’s lives out of poverty and misery.  Outside of the deep questions of existence, consciousness, and the nature of our universe, I can’t think of a more important topic to discuss.  Everyone should, at least once in their life, deeply think about why poverty exists and consider the source of mankind’s wealth and prosperity.  Dr. Robert Gorden, an economics professor from Northwestern University, just recently published a paper related to worldwide economic growth.  In it, he takes a historical look all the way back to the year 1300 examining the causes of our wealth and prosperity and whether or not those trends are going to continue.  I’d like to discuss some of the paper’s contents.

Looking at this question from a large scale is mesmerizing.  Mankind has lived in abject poverty and misery throughout almost all of our species’ existence.  Take the year 1700 as a baseline.  If you look at how people lived in 1700, you’ll find them very poor, struggling to live day by day.  They’re toiling out in the fields, they’re slaving away, and they die at a very young age.  They have no political power of any sort.  The kings and feudal lords dictate every aspect of their lives.  Their teeth rot out, the slightest infection or sickness does them in, and their clothes are dirty and stinky.  They go to bed in straw beds filled with vermin.  They itch, they’re tired, and their lives are short.  There’s constant wars, conflict, and superstition is everywhere.  Everything from a shooting star to an eclipse is interpreted as a divine warning.  People suffering from mental disorders like epilepsy are thought to be possessed by demons and are forced to endure all kinds of tortures.  You go to town and the entire place is dingy and smelly.  Farm animals and horses are walking the streets, pooping in the middle of the road.  Their lives are pretty much miserable.  If you read the history books all you hear about is the kings and the nobles.  You don’t hear about the peasants and the everyday men and women who lived in the era.

If you go back 300 years before 1700, it’s basically the same.  Go back another 300 years, still the same.  Go back 300 years before that, it’s all basically the same.  There were some really minor advances but nothing really noteworthy.  For the most part, people were uneducated, superstitious, and lived hard lives filled with toil and misfortune.  People changed religious ideas all the time, and all kinds of wars were fought over which was the “true” god or goddess.  Popes, prophets, and mystics ran around babbling nonsense.  The religious virgins took pride in their abstinence and went to great lengths to fill people’s mind with guilt just for having a natural sexual attraction to one another.  Kings, nobles, and warlords played God with people’s lives, sending them off to fight wars to defend fictitious territorial lines.  It’s just depressing.

I have a whole book here at the house filled with maps of the world in different eras.  You flip through it and see all the different empires and their territories. I try to be an educated scholar, and I’ve read the story of the history of mankind many times from different historians, but it’s never been a subject which truly grabs me.  When I try to honestly assess why I feel this way, I think I’m ashamed of my species.

But let’s jump back to the year 1700.  This is roughly the period when human progress explodes.  There were these Enlightenment philosophers like John Locke, David Hume, Blaise Pascal, and others, who looked at the world objectively.  They acknowledged how bad things were, and they basically said, “It’s up to us to change the human condition.”  When everyone around them was superstitious about everything , these great men and women argued that we should be free to think as we please.  They minimized the role of religion in our lives and told us to look for naturalistic causes to things.  Instead of looking to divine authority to give us ethical rules and guide our society, they told us to think for ourselves and carefully consider the best ways to live based on reason and evidence.  They’d stumbled upon a recipe for success.

Dr. Jeff Borland of the University of Melbourne is offering a good Coursera (take it!  they’re free!) course called Generating The Wealth Of Nations, which I’d highly recommend to anyone interested.  Here is the course description.

If you had been alive at the start of the eighteenth century, your material well-being would have been much the same whichever region of the world you lived in, and it would almost certainly have been a precarious existence.  Go back 300 years before the eighteenth century, and not much was different.  But come forward 300 years to the present, and we see a startling transformation.

Incomes in some parts of the world have increased more than ten-fold; and now it most certainly does matter where you live – with income differentials of 50 times between the world’s richest and poorest countries.  What has changed in the past 300 years is the development and application of new technologies at a pace unprecedented in human history – the steam engine, electricity and the computer, to name just a few.  With these developments, for those who have access to them, have come huge gains in living standards.

In this course we’ll explore the spectacular (but uneven) story of economic development – beginning with the Malthusian era, moving on to the take-off of growth in the Industrial Revolution and the Great Divergence in living standards that followed, and finishing in the present with the Global Financial Crisis.  We’ll cover the main episodes and events in the development of the world economy in the past 300 years, and have something to say about most regions of the world.  As well as dealing with ‘what happened’, the course will emphasise what is known about ‘why’ – and what lessons historical experience can provide for understanding how some countries today are so rich yet others remain so poor.

Progress was exponential.  As Dr. Gorden points out in the paper, and Dr. Borland mentions in his course description, there were three great industrial revolutions.  The first happened in the years between 1750 and 1830.  Research in thermodynamics led to the creation of engines which led to the first steam trains and railroads.  A network of rail began connecting the world and products could be shipped cheaply all over the world.  Next was the discovery and mastery of electricity during the late 1800s.  This led to running water, indoor toilets, telegraph communications, indoor lightning, and so on.  It was huge.  By 1920 you start seeing modern cities powered by electricity.  Old horse wagons were also replaced by cars running on similar thermodynamic engines, but now powered by petroleum.  The last great revolution began somewhere in the 1940~1960s which was the advent of computers, the internet, and mobile communications.

Those three great revolutions made a mockery out of all that came before.  People used to pray and wail before deities in temples and nothing happened.  They sacrificed their loved ones on the altar to no avail.  Nobody came to save them from their sicknesses and diseases.  They tried drinking one another’s blood, hoping it somehow contained the “life-force”, but they couldn’t stop the aging process.  Now matter how many times they prostrated themselves in the dirt, the rains came when they wanted to, and they still had to labor in those dry fields with hand tools, barely able to eek out an existence.  Then a few hundred years later an explosion happened.  It’s amazing.

Increases in technology aren’t the only thing important to prosperity, but I’d say they’re the most important.  You can have a really efficient and just government, but if you can’t produce anything in any sort of abundance, you’re not going to get anywhere.

Speaking of which, our social institutions are going to need some major overhauls in the future.  Wealth inequality is a huge issue today.  The Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman commented on recent developments in automation in a blog post.





– Dr. Paul Krugman, Is Growth Over?

As Jaron Lanier points out in this video below, there was a strange drop in middle class wealth during the third industrial revolution (computers and the internet).  Why is that?   Wealth is concentrating in fewer and fewer hands.  As more things are automated, human workers are less needed, and Big Data is giving elites an almost unfair competitive edge, creating impossible barriers to entry.

Take a company like Walmart.  They have such a powerful information network, small companies could never organize themselves or get the sorts of deals they can.  Local shops are all pushed out of business.  Combine this with the fact that Walmart’s warehouses are nearly completely automated, and their stores use automated checkouts, they take much more out of the community than they put back in.  In the short-run, the people think, “Woohoo, cheaper prices.”  Then in the long term, job prospects in their community dwindle.  Eventually Walmart will become a complete vacuum, providing no jobs but sucking lots of money out everywhere they’re located.  The circular flow of money doesn’t happen and their stores are a negative impact on the local economy.

Machines are still a long way from thinking as clearly as we do, but progress in AI is on an exponential climb.  You can’t write it off.  I think we’re going to have  to eventually reexamine our notions of private property and whether or not it’s ethically right for a handful of business owners of a company like Walmart, which will eventually be completely automated (they’re getting close now), to keep all of the profits which were once paying people’s wages.  This is especially true considering that most of the AI and robotics research took place in public labs funded by universities and the government.  We can’t let these rich Wall Street tycoons run everything and reap all the benefits just because they own the corporations, the information networks, and the automated factories producing everything.  All the wealth will concentrate in a few people’s hands and the rest of us will be left without.

What I’m Studying These Days

I thought I’d take a little time and tell everyone what I’m reading at the moment, and why I’m reading those books in particular.  When I study things, I tend to be reading a lot of books at the same time, but different books have different priorities and get more or less of my time.

I bought a textbook written by Dr. Gazzaniga called Cognitive Neuroscience, which I’m about to start reading.  Cognitive neuroscience is like the mid-way point between neuroscience and psychology, covering how the biology of the mind gives rise to cognition.  It talks about neurons, how our brain forms perceptions and encodes information, object recognition, cognitive deficits which we incur if we have brain damage, attention, learning, memory, language, how the neocortex is specialized in different areas, and so forth.  Later chapters involve emotion, how our brain evolved, and eventually the book ends on problems related to how brain activity gives rise to consciousness.  So I’m looking forward to reading that.  I also purchased another textbook of his called Psychological Science.   I’ll probably read that next.

You’ll always find some sort of neuroscience, psychology, or cognition book on my desk.  Over a decade ago I started a quest to understand thought and what it means to be a human.  I approach the subject from just about every angle you can think of.  Lately I’ve also been watching lecture series on artificial intelligence, mainly because I believe that if you deeply understand something, you can build it.  If you want to claim you understand how the mind works, you should be able to build a machine which can think, reason, and emulate human behavior.  Looking at the algorithms we’ve created and seeing how well they work, and comparing them to how our brains are structured (cognitive neuroscience), I’m always learning what I do and do not understand about myself.

I ended up buying a textbook on International Relations written by Joshua Goldstein.  From what I’ve read, it’s the most popular university textbook used.  It’s also praised in Amazon.com reviews, so I figured I’d start with it.  I’ve never formally studied international relations, but I’ve sort of picked up bits and pieces of it from all the history and economics books I’ve read.  So far, I’ve read the first chapter, but I just got it the other day.   Since we’re on the topic of politics, I’m going to soon read a book written by the Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz called The Price Of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future.  Here’s the Amazon.com review of the book.


It seems like everyday things are getting worse here in the U.S, super PACs being the latest in a long line of atrocities.  The rich and powerful completely control our political process and what do we get?  We end up with corporate welfare, bailouts, removal of the Glass-Steagall regulations, exploding healthcare costs, exploding education costs, and the list goes on.  The rich and powerful who benefit from this corruption keep out necessary reforms.  I’ve watched Dr. Stiglitz in many videos on Youtube, and after viewing a lot of his stuff, I wanted to get some of his books.

Each day when I’m out for a walk, I have a small mp3 player loaded with Steven Pinker’s book The Better Angels Of Our Nature.  I listen to about an hour a day as I walk.  I used to find going for walks pretty boring.  It’s a lot better if I have someone intelligent and interesting to talk to.  But if I don’t, the next best think is to listen to a guy like Steven Pinker.

Another book I’ve had my eye on is MIT psychologist Dr. Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together.  It’s about how online sites like Facebook and Tumblr  influence the human mind and change how we interact with one another.  She argues that these phones, blogs, and other digital communication mediums change who we are and not necessarily in good ways.  We demand more from our technology and less from each other.  We’re having trouble relating to one another.

I didn’t start attending college until roughly ten years after I had graduated high school.  When I sat through my first classes, I couldn’t understand the culture.  Young people today just sit there texting on their phones, ignoring the real people around them.  They text one another during class and ignore the lecturer.  Once they’re out of class they’re calling each other and texting one another.  They walk out into the street, staring at that little phone, ignoring the traffic.  Students in the hallway all have their heads down staring at these little glowing devices.  It’s bizarre to me.  I’m not that old, but when I was in school, nobody had these phones.  I don’t understand them.

Now we can get into some of the math and physics stuff I’m studying — I’m always studying this sort of stuff as well.  My other quest is to understand the fundamental laws which govern this universe.  What is space?  What is matter?  What is the world I exist within made of?  How does it work?

My main focus over the past six months has been related to computational physics, but I’ve also been studying quantum physics in general.  I studied all sorts of algorithms related to simulating quantum physics and electromagnetic phenomenon.  I also took time to write a lot of simulators and rendered them on my screen.  I’m currently writing 2D and 3D time-dependent simulations of quantum wave packets scattering from various potentials.  I’m using what would be called a leap-frog algorithm and it’s really fast.

I’ve also been reading two books, one that I’ve just about finished with, another I’m going to be starting.  The first is a book called An Introduction To Quantum Physics by A.P. French which is a textbook they use at MIT.  It focuses more on explaining quantum physics, and not so much mathematically working out problems.  All of the MIT Introductory Physics series is good.  I particularly enjoyed French’s Vibrations and Waves.  Highly recommended. Next on my list is Quantum Physics of Atoms, Molecules, Solids, Nuclei and Particles by Eisberg and Resnick.  It’s also another textbook which was written to explain quantum physics, being less focused around the mathematics, and more on explaining things.

Last on my “high priority” studies has been practicing programming clusters of computers.  Over the past month and a half or so I’ve been researching MPI (Message Passing Interface), which allows you to program huge clusters of networked computers and have them all work together on a single scientific problem.  Just this last semester I wrote a thermodynamic simulator for class and it took FOREVER to run.  I simulated the magnetic properties of a material at different temperatures, looking for the phase transition, and as my lattice size grew the amount of required computations rose exponentially.  If you do serious computational work, you have to know how to utilize computational clusters.  I’ve pretty much figured out MPI now, but I haven’t yet had the chance to use it on any big clusters.  I did however set up my computer to dual boot Linux and I set up Open MPI in my Ubuntu installation.  I then wrote some MPI programs and simulated 10 cores on my laptop to see if I understood what I was doing.  It worked like a charm.

I eventually got MPI working on my Windows 7 installation, but I’m learning that if you want to do scientific computing, you want to go with Linux.  You can get Open MPI working on Linux with just a simple single installation with no configuration of any kind.   It was a real pain to get everything working on Windows.

I’d like to also fool around with Posix PThreads and OpenMP, but I haven’t had a chance yet.  I’ve got a book explaining them, but I still need to read it all.

I Loathe Congress

You may think you’re alone in thinking our leaders these days are nuts.  You’re not.  Their approval rating over this past year hovers around 10-15%.  Everybody hates them.

Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif) proposed an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, removing the clause where American citizens can be detained without trial.  In particular, her amendment said,


When this first came up, I was hopeful.  Maybe there are a few decent men and women left in Congress after all?  Nah, who was I kidding.  The amendment was silently removed and the politicians are hoping we won’t notice.  Well, a few of us who keep up with these things noticed and we’ve been screaming for years about the Patriot Act and the NDAA.  However, I can testify first hand that nobody cares.


Yes, of course it’s a no-brainer, to people who have brains.  Gee, do people deserve a trial by their peers, where their charges are openly presented and all the evidence is weighed out before they’re convicted of a crime?  That’s kind of important for democracy.  *Imitates Sen. Lindsey Graham*  “You want a lawwyyer?  SHUT UP!  Al Qaeda, Bin Laden, Iran has nuclear weapons!  Terrahists, enemy combatunz, weaponz of mass destructionz, we’re all gunna die!”

I loathe that man’s existence.  Fear-mongering imbecile.  Should we close down Guantanamo Bay?  “We’re at war!  Al Qaeda’s bent on our destructionz!  Are you crayzie?  We can’t have civil liberteez in this day and age!”  No, how about you shut up.  They haven’t attacked us in over ten years.

The American people have spoken you say?  Yeah, they’re speaking directly to you in each of your videos comments.  I’ll post them for you.

“you know, the Pentagon’s declared this nation’s sovereign debt as the greatest national security threat. Maybe we should indefinitely detain all 535 members of congress until they pass a balanced budget. And when they say “I want to speak to my lawyer,” you tell them “SHUT UP, you don’t get a lawyer! You’re an enemy combatant and we want to talk to you about why you’re supporting Bin Laden’s main objective!”
– MrGoldfinch88

“Lindsey Graham is broken toilet of a human being over flowing with shit. People like him are a far greater threat to the American people then the terrorists in the middle east. The war on terror is a farce that’s being used to take away our freedom.”
– Membrane556

“Why do the American people elect crazy idiots like this, this guy comes across like his lost a few screws in the head. This guy is at war in his own brain, fucking idiot, idiots like this will eventually be voted out of office. People like this remind me of Maximilien Robespierre completely paranoid and deluded by the position of power he was granted. The French eventually got rid of him, VOTE THIS IDIOT OUT!”
– AMAM5617

“I’m ashamed this man was voted into office in my state. SOUTH CAROLINA – Let’s make sure we nominate someone with some intelligence and fortitude in this next election and get this puppet out of office”
– AwakeningDayeon

“they hate us for our freedumz”
– abovestand

Yep.  They hate uz for our freedumz so we dun gotta take em’ away before the terrahists get em’ furst!

You know what gets to me?  The average man or woman has all sorts of opinions, but they’re always related to things that don’t matter.  They know about every movie and every role their favorite actors have played.  They know all sorts of complicated statistics related to their favorite sports teams and players.  They play games like World of Warcraft and know about every spell, buff, and the stats of all this equipment.  These political issues are way easier to understand than any of that.  It’s not that people are too stupid to understand what’s going on.  They just don’t care, and if we don’t put a little effort into learning about these things, people like Sen. Graham are going to flush our freedom down the toilet.