Couple Items

Life has been hard lately. I have gotten a few books read, and still have a post on what I might do if given the job of setting up a truly Catholic school. So some book reviews and speculation about schooling in the pipeline. In the meantime:

Dawn at Recusant Ranch:

Rosy-Dactyled Dawn!

Cell-phone pictures don’t really get it – the sky was very dark, with just the rosy clouds and a line of light right on the hills. But still pretty.

Next, a subject of some interest to me: how old, really, is civilization? Standard answer: the oldest civilization found is Sumer, which is about 4,500 years old. Egypt is ion that range, too. But – both of those places are largely hot and dry, relying on rivers for water. Therefore, monumental architecture of stone and brick stands a much better chance of surviving in those places, and not getting covered in jungle, buried in mud, sinking into soft costal soils, and so on. Also, wood and fronds are perfectly good building materials, one can even build really large structures out of them – but they won’t be around a thousand years later.

Put it all together, and it is possible there are much older civilizations than those we’ve found so far. Göbekli Tepe is about 11,500 years old. It is thought that the site was purposely buried when abandoned. A project that large seems unlikely to have been built by a bunch of nomads. One reason for Sumer and Egypt being where they are is that enough food could be consistently produced in the area to allow for the massive man hours needed to build the monuments.

No expert here, but are there not commonly legends told in known ancient civilizations about much older civilizations? Atlantis? Just as the Iliad was proved true in its broad sweep – there was a Troy, and it was destroyed about the specified time – could these legends and myths be likewise true?

I have no evidence, of course, just speculating on the randomness and fragility of the river of time. What washes up, what survives, is some tiny fragments of what was. These fragments tend to be random, and tend to be tough – the complete works of Aristotle written on vellum have not shown up yet. Stelle have.

No real point here, except that I can’t dismiss this video out of hand, even if it tends toward the spectacular:

The main claim: there is strong genetic evidence in certain Amazonian tribes of aboriginal DNA – in other words, these tribes at least produced offspring with people from the aboriginal tribes that now inhabit, for example, Australia. What this would mean is that some people way, way back figured out transoceanic travel way before the Polynesians. This genetic evidence is only present in certain areas of South America, and is completely absent from North American native peoples.

So? Big deal? We’re talking 10,000 miles, more or less, of open ocean. Was there a culture of amazing sailing long, long ago? Virtually all the materials used in primitive boats is not going to survive tens of thousands of years, especially given the ocean’s appetite for destruction and the varying sea levels as the ice age ended. Any coastal settlements from 12,000 or more years ago would be under 400′ of water now.

I don’t know. And maybe all this is crazy – my plate is too full to dig into it much farther. But it’s not so crazy that I can dismiss it with any confidence. And as readers here know, the claim that Science! establishes dogmas and punishes heretics is completely factual.

That’s all for now.

How Many Trees? Understanding Science 101, Conclusions

Started here, continued here, here. and here. Since science is the study of the metrical (measurable, countable) properties of physical objects, we need to be very careful with our measuring and counting. We’ve talked about how, even or especially in what appear to be simple situations, it’s critically important to know

• what is being counted
• how it is to be counted
• who is doing the counting
• why it is being counted

To put this negatively, if you don’t know the answers to these questions, you cannot ‘follow the science’. You can do as you’re told, but without this information, you simply do not know what you’re talking about. Or, to go back to language I’ve favored in the past, an honest man owes no allegiance to any claims that ‘science has shown’ unless all the above issues have been satisfactorily addressed.

In a saner world, these questions would be used to filter out unsubstantiated claims. An inability or unwillingness to answer these questions is a sure sign of a charlatan, that you are being manipulated toward someone else’s goals.

Modern cargo cult science reveals itself readily when faced with these issues. The advocates for just doing as you’re told hate this stuff, and play their ‘I’m an expert, you’re an ignorant peon’ card whenever anyone starts asking uncomfortable questions. And, indeed, it does help in some situations to be familiar with the terms and methods of particular branches of science. BUT – not usually. Usually, a general understanding of how science works, such as I’ve tried to lay out in these short essays, is enough to push back against unsubstantiated claims of ‘science’.

To give a harmless example, I know very little about cosmology or astrophysics. But what I do know: it’s pretty hard, or at least, pretty uncertain, to count and measure faint objects billions and billions of miles away. I’m not sure how, exactly, the motion of stars in the fringes of galaxies millions of light years away are being measured – but I can imagine it’s not super-tidy. There are going to be theories stacked upon theories and tons of math supporting any conclusions. So, when cosmologists argue over dark matter, I keep in mind that this is all based on very difficult observations of what appear from here to be tiny dots of light, if that. And that the motion of these stars is not something anyone can directly see, but rather is based on another stack of theories – Hubble’s Law, standard candles, red shifts, and so on.

I have no reason to doubt any of this stuff – but I also have no reason to give anything more than very conditional assent. So that when the James Webb starts throwing shade on all this, I’m not surprised in the least. It’s hard not to think of modern cosmology as a house of cards. But – at least it’s harmless. Nobody is likely to die over the proof or disproof of cosmological theories.

Now to the hard examples: when the Covid panic hit, I, along with many others, started looking for the answers to the basic questions above. On the ‘what is being counted’ front, we have a pile of undefined or poorly defined terms, and utter inconsistency from place to place and over time. What’s a ‘case’? How about a ‘death’? These seem easy – but remember the trees! Then came the ‘how’ – total chaos in the data! At various times and places, a ‘death’ meant anyone who died while having any 2 symptoms, without any testing to confirm. Other times and places, anyone dying after a positive test, regardless of symptoms or actual cause of death (I remember death #2 in California – a drug addict who overdosed and had no symptoms – but had tested positive!) And so on.

The ‘who’ included nursing home docs in a situation where the home got substantial money for caring for Covid patients. Hardly a conflict of interest free situation. In science, in tricky judgement situations, it’s common to have a second party far removed from the immediate judgement review and confirm the count. Never happened here.

The ‘why’ stinks to high heaven.

Do I know anything much about virology or genetic engineering or epidemiology? Not really – but the point here is that I didn’t need to know much to spot the obvious fraud. None of the issues involved are related to the scientific specialties - all are general principles of science and logic.

Finally, the right answer to virtually all scientific questions is: I don’t know. Really. There’s much more uncertainty and guesswork out there than the practitioners and the mindless cheerleaders will ever admit. Remember: for an assertion that ‘science has shown’ to carry any weight at all, at a minimum the issues above must be addressed. It’s not a crime to not know the answer – it’s a crime to push an agenda without being willing or able to answer.

There are layers and layers, and some things really are complex, but these simple rules will smoke out the fraudsters almost every time.

Apropos of Counting Trees…

I’ll wrap up that series later when I have a minute, but this was too good to pass up as an illustration of what I’m getting at.

From Quotulatiousness, via MeWe: “An error of this magnitude makes one wonder how robust such calculations are” an excerpt follows.

As I pointed out on what I shall continue to call Twitter, the estimates as bunkum. They come from Frontier Economics and were first commissioned by the makers of Wegovy, presumably to make their effective but expensive weight loss drug look like a relative bargain.

Their previous estimate of the cost of obesity to “society” was £58bn. This year’s estimate is £98bn, most of which (£57bn) comes from lost quality-adjusted life years. As I tire of pointing out, these are internal costs to the individual which, by definition, are not costs to wider society. I can’t stress enough how absurd it is to include lost productivity due to early death as a cost to the economy. You might as well calculate the lost productivity of people who have never been born and claim that contraception costs the economy billions of pounds.

Since the previous estimate, the costs have been bulked up by including the costs of being overweight, but there is no indication in the wafer-thin webpage of what these are. Being merely overweight doesn’t have many serious health implications. The healthcare costs have doubled, but as in the previous report, the new estimate does not look at how much more healthcare would be consumed if there was no obesity. No savings are included. What we need is the net cost.

The “report” that The Times turned into a front page news story is no more than a glorified blog post. It contains no detail, no methodology and none of the assumptions upon which it is based can be checked. It comes with an eight page slideshow from Frontier Economics which is described as a “full analysis” but which doesn’t contain any useful figures either.

Estimates like this are bound to mislead the casual reader into thinking that they are paying higher taxes because of obesity. There is no other reason to publish them, as they have no academic merit. They are designed to be misunderstood.

Sure enough, the very next day The Times was explicitly claiming that the putative £98 billion — now rounded up to £100 billion — was a direct cost to government …

Christopher Snowden 

Jumping the gun on the conclusion to the counting trees essays: go through the thought process of setting up this ‘study’. You’ve got, off the top of my head –

• What constitutes obesity? (Note this is a fairly contentious area, even excluding the ‘body positive’ lunatics. BMI, for example, is so basically flawed as to be useless – yet it’s used all the time.)
• How is it measured? No, really – you throwing the *population* on a scale, one by one? Or – what? Any holes or biases in whatever your method is?
• What constitutes a ‘cost’? How is it measured? (I have a finance degree. This is like a minefield-level question. Fights break out over the allocation of indirect costs.)

And dozens more questions. Let’s just stop there. Here we have *one* number presented as the *truth*. It should be obvious even without the writer’s takedown that it’s absurd.

More later, just had to share this.

How Many Trees? Understanding Science 101, part 4

Started here, continued here and here. We’ve reached the point where we’ve settled on definitions, and maybe, we hope, settled on a single methodology:

Say we’ve decided that each team of counters is to count every tree they can approach and measure (4″ diameter at 18″ off the ground). Every homeowner on the block will be asked permission for access to their back yards. Backyards that cannot be accessed due to denial of or other failure to obtain permission will be assumed to have the average of the backyards for which counts were obtained. This process will be followed by each of 10 teams of counters over the course of a month.

Next, we need to decide how we will determine our final number. Average? Simply state the range? Make some more or less reasonable assumptions , and choose a count? Each of these make some degree of sense. What doesn’t make sense is stating any number as if it is THE count. The sciency thing to do is to state how the number was arrived at and all the decisions and rules used to get the counts themselves. You do this so the reader can understand the limitations of the count, and decide how useful it is.

It needs to be stressed that there is no one count that can simply be stated without qualification. Unless our block has no trees (and we can validate this by looking everywhere), or perhaps is manicured like a park such that only a handful of large trees are present (and we can verify this), there is simply no way for a bunch of people to manually count trees however defined, such that it can be confidently stated exactly how many trees are in a block.

And that number may change tomorrow.

I hope I’ve made clear that even simple sounding questions – “How many trees do you have on your property?” – can be devilishly hard to answer.

The next step cuts to the heart of science: who is doing the counting, and why?

Let’s mix it up a little: now we want to know the number of trees on 1,000 acres of Forest Service land. This land is being considered for leasing out for harvest. In this case, what qualifies as a tree is limited to conifers suitable for lumber – say, minimum 16″ in diameter 18″ off the ground. Or, I’m sure that the lumber industry has developed a thorough way of determining if a given area is worth harvesting – let’s assume we’re using whatever method that is.

Now we have 10 teams who will independently use the agreed upon methodology to count trees. Let’s assume that more trees equals better for the lumber companies that will be bidding on the right to harvest these 1,000 acres. Here are our 10 teams:

Team 1: Retired people who live right along the border of the 1,000 acres

Team 2: Representatives of the John Muir Society

Team 3: Professional assessors working for Lumber Company A

Team 4: Earth First! members

Team 5: Local woodworking enthusiasts

Team 6: People who live downstream along a creek that flows through the 1,000 acres

Team 7: Professional assessors working for Lumber Company B

Team 8: People from a lumber company not expected to bid here, but who have lumber rights to 10,000 acres in the area.

Team 9: Local fishing enthusiasts who consider the creek that flows through the 1,000 acres to be their personal hot spot.

Team 10: a team from a company trying to sell counts based on satellite images.

Is this information you, as a consumer as it were of the numbers, want. In other words, you would want to be aware of who exactly is doing the counting and why. You would want to know of any known or potential conflicts of interest.

You’re not getting one number, or even one range of umbers, that agrees across teams, except by chance. Here’s the kicker: even if the counters are the most scrupulously honest people in the world, it’s all but certain that their interests will skew the count in the direction they would like. One is tempted to say that, of all the counters, the lumber company assessors are the most likely to reach an honest count, because it is in their company’s interest to know exactly what they might be bidding on. BUT – since they’re estimating anyway, maybe they give a low estimate as their teams’ report – and use a high estimate to base their company’s bid on. They could do exactly that – with a clean conscience!

It is fair to say that Western science consists of recognizing and addressing all the issues listed in these four little essays. This last – confirmation bias – is in some ways the biggest and most pernicious problem. The most important part to keep in mind: the possibility of confirmation bias lurks even in the work of the most honest and diligent researcher. Alas, it is also a truism to say that a scientist suspects confirmation bias in everybody’s work except his own.

One more installment to wrap this up.

I Love the James Webb Telescope

…because I like being right. What I’m right about is how the Science! is settled right up until people get a better good look at, well, just about anything. As I point out here, among many other places, it’s a safe bet that things anyone has only seen from hundreds of millions of miles away will look different when seen from ‘only’ a million miles away, or that something seen only through the then-current gizmos will look a lot different when seen through the latest and greatest gizmos.

It seems the JWST has seen things that do not comport well with current theory. While scientists may be shocked to imagine their precious theories are not exactly right, I sure am not.

The humor here, at least for me, and the single greatest cautionary tale for anyone ‘following the science’ is how stone cold certain scientists are about their theories right up until they’re overthrown, and then how those same scientists get just as certain of the new theories they’ve cooked up to explain the new observations. After a brief period of fluster, rarely is the shift from Theory A to Theory B even acknowledged to have taken place. Rather, a serene, confident calm descends on the field – of course our Theory B is right! Rince and repeat – this is the real history of science.*

The James Webb doing its thing.

So ‘we’ – a handful of astrophysicists and related experts – have these way-cool theories about how old the universe is, how it formed, what the rules must have been 13+ billion years ago. And oops! they don’t seem to cover the new observations. Step 1: tinker under the hood. Maybe we just need a slight tune-up here or there to make it all better. Step 2: if the tune-up doesn’t get it done, then move on to finding the one problem child in the current theory we need to modify. Step 3: come up with an effectively new theory. Step 4: however the earlier steps were resolved, act as if nothing really happened, and trumpet the modified or new theory as The Science with as much confidence and certainty as the old theory was until recently proclaimed.

The educated layman should note that these cosmological theories are exactly the kinds of theories ripe for overthrow: they have no practical applications and so will never get practically tested, they are based on observations of extremely distant phenomena using more or less sophisticated yet necessarily limited tools, they are Russian dolls of nested assumptions.

This last point bears expansion. To take one case: the redshift. The concept of a wavelength shift due to the relative motion of the source and receiver is solid, testable science. So the idea that stars and galaxies are moving relative to us because the light coming from them is redshifted (or blue-shifted) is sound – but it should be noted, one step removed from direct observation. Now lay on top of that stellar and galactic motion Hubble’s Law. This is the idea that speed corresponds to distance, such that the more redshifted the light from a galaxy appears to us, the farther away it is. Here’s the catch – Hubble’s Law is only testable through independent observation for a small subset of comparatively near objects. Exactly where this Law is most applied – very distant objects – it is least testable, as in usually completely untestable. But the entire edifice of current theory stands upon it.

Scientists then back into age: that object is far away from us (using Hubble’s Law) moving at some ‘known’ (through the redshift) speed, so math says that what we’re seeing is really old – it has taken some number of billions of years for the light to come to us from that distance.

Now, all of this is results from perfectly sound logic, and maybe it’s exactly right, but it should be kept in mind that it stands on a heck of a whole lot of assumptions not backed by tests or observations. The Andromeda Galaxy is approaching the Milky Way and will get here in about a billion years. ‘We’ (certain specialists) ‘know’ this, because ‘we’ ‘know’ the distance between the galaxies (using ‘Standard Candles‘, I think) and because of the blue shift in the spectrum of the Andromeda Galaxy as observed from earth. (If there is some other, independent, way to reach this conclusion, I am not aware of it. I’m not really very up-to-date on this stuff, so please correct me.)

All of this makes sense. But so does phlogiston, as does the idea that the Earth is stationary. More to the point, so does the idea that planets develop in pretty much the orbits we see them in today. Problem is, phlogiston isn’t real, the earth does move, and planets seem to form in one orbit and then get moved into other orbits or even get ejected from their systems of origin. The Music of the Spheres evidently modulates across any number of keys.

These are three – phlogiston, stationary earth, and formation of planets – of many examples where following the science meant accepting theories that have since been proven wrong. They all three make a lot of sense. All three have decent sized mountains of evidence in their favor. Yet all three have been overthrown by contrary evidence – evidence you needed better equipment, better logic, or both to obtain.

So, hurray for the Webb! I am and have long been a huge fan. It is exceeding my wildest hopes, so far, by making a lot of scientists sweat a little. I love cosmology because, being completely useless, it is almost completely apolitical. Also, being completely useless, it will never get tested by application, so will remain a Wild West of sorts as far as theorizing goes. What’s a decade or more late and 300+% cost overruns compared to this level of fun?

* as opposed to technology. Once science becomes applied, people really do gain a degree of confidence not available in ‘pure’ science. The melting point of iron is well-established, not so much by scientists but by the millions of technicians who routinely melt iron. We have reached this point of science applied to real-life challenges in many fields, such that the basic, useful facts of those fields are established with a high degree of confidence: chemistry, metallurgy, electronics, various engineering fields, and so on. But in many fields, the less cautious of the practitioners overreach: we really don’t know much about genetic engineering, not in the sense that a good engineer knows that his bridge will stand up, based on centuries of his peers building such bridges. Geneticists may be able to do a wide range of interesting things in a consistent and repeatable manner – but centuries of repeatable successes in the real world are still centuries out. And all this applied science is on way WAY firmer footing than anything a cosmologist or astrophysicist theorizes about.

How Many Trees? Understanding Science 101, part 3

Continued from here and here. First off, let’s specify a reason for this count, which is also the reason for the particular specifications below: we are an emergency preparedness team only interested in trees that could conceivably cause trouble in an emergency by, for example, falling on a house or a car. Or, if we want to get all apocalyptic, trees that are big enough to be burned for fuel (which is why we want to exclude banana trees – I suspect they don’t burn too well). For these or some other reason, we have settled on the definitions below.

Let’s agree, for now, on the definition of ‘tree’ that we’ve been using so far:

a tree is defined as a plant with bark that is at least 4″ in diameter when measured 18″ off the ground.

And the definition of a block as defined by reader rimgrund362ec8fa03:

 [A] block [is defined] as being bordered along the centers of the streets that define it. And a tree is in the block if the trunk is entirely inside the block as defined. If your counters encounter a tree growing in the street, notify the public works department and have them remove it before continuing the count.

We are just hoping these streets don’t have medians with trees planted in them, as do several of the streets around here. Rather than having the city taxpayers pay both to have them planted and cared for and then removed, we will simply stipulate that any such median trees are to be ignored for the purpose of this exercise.

We recognize that, yes, this definition excludes banana trees, small trees (less than 18″ tall), and skinny trees (less than 4″ in diameter). We have agreed, for now, to make note of border cases, such as cypress trees bent to the ground by the wind, or giant suckers growing from roots, on the assumption that a) they are unlikely in the block of interest, and b) even if there are a few, it’s probably not going to be material. But the counters have been instructed to note oddities, if any, such as these.

So we get our 10, say, teams together. Let’s stipulate that each team consists of 3 ‘researchers’: one who primarily keeps records, and 2 who make measurements. I envision somebody with a clipboard (or computer) and two people with measuring tools: an 18″ stick, and a set of calipers set to 4″.

Go! Each team gets to decide where to start. Team A starts at one corner, and immediately counts 10 trees that are clearly upon inspection much bigger than the lower limits: towering maples, oaks, and pines. They also spot the crowns of what they can only assume are large trees – in the backyards of several homes.

Sooo – Team A can either decide that those backyard trees are so obviously large that they should count them, full stop. OR they could go knock on the door, hope somebody is home, and ask permission to go in the backyard for a closer inspection. OR they could ask the owners how many large trees they have in their backyard, and use that number. OR they could resort to aerial pictures, or maybe just fly a drone over the block, and count the trees based on their crowns…

OR maybe knock on every door, hope at least a few people let them into their backyards, count the trees in those backyards by hand – and then average the counts, and use that average to estimate the number of trees in the backyards they could not get into. They will probably discover that some of the crowns they spotted from the street are in fact two or more similar trees growing close together, or that there are a number of trees as specified that failed to tower over the roof of the house and thus were invisible from the street. The ‘counting visible crowns of trees from the street’ is probably not going to yield acceptable numbers.

OR leave an official looking notice in every mailbox, asking for permission to enter each backyard, then schedule the counting over the next few weeks. And only THEN, after getting as many hand counts in as many backyards as possible in that timeframe, average the counts and multiply by the number of backyards they didn’t get into…

I hope it’s clear that, assuming the teams are largely independent, whatever plan Team A chooses to follow, Teams B through J are unlikely to follow the same approach. They could also report back to the lead researcher with their problems, and a centralized coordinated solution could be reached. Then we must hope that this one consistent approach is used consistently without material error.

Then there’s the coverage issues: how does each team make sure they really looked everywhere, and didn’t just skip (or double count) a bunch of trees? There are more or less standard approaches – a map with a grid on it such that each team is charged to count the trees within each much smaller grid, and then add them up. But this brings us back to some of the problems we discussed when defining a block: how do we make sure a tree that straddles a gridline gets counted once and only once?

And so on. Even assuming all teams agree to each definition and rules (and each understand them the same way!), we are still looking at a situation where it would be a minor miracle if any two counts agreed with each other.

Tree?

This is also true if there’s only one team that honestly repeats the exercise over time. Even the same people trying to do the same job the same way are unlikely to get the same results. For just one example: if the team chooses any of the approaches that require estimating the trees in backyards to which they have not gotten access, it will make a difference if they get exactly the same people to let them in each time they do the count. And, of course, over time, people plant and cut down trees. Trees die, small trees become larger.

Another thing that needs to be defined in this context: material. If there are hundreds of trees on this block (according to our arbitrary definition of ‘tree’), how much does it matter if we miss one? 10? 100? What if there are only 20 trees on the block? Now missing one tree is a 5% error. Is that immaterial? So imagine all 10 teams come back, and their counts are all within 15% of each other. Good enough? 20%? One factor, probably the main one, will be what we’re using the numbers *for*. The most common thing to do is to simply assume the ‘real’ count is somewhere in the middle, say the average. But how would we check that? Perhaps all 10 counts are low, due to an unknown systemic problem. Then the highest estimate is the closest to the ‘real’ count. Or maybe the other way around. How would you know, or figure it out?

The point here: even the most systematic, focused, and unbiased counters are unlikely to get the same counts, either in groups all at once, or as a single team over time. And remember the counts, however accurate or not, are still based on arbitrary assumptions that need to be understood if the numbers are to be used outside the teams doing the counting.

Next: can we count on the teams being skillful, honest, and unbiased? How?

How Many Trees? Understanding Science 101, part 2

Continuing this discussion. Thanks to those who have read and commented on the last post.

Let’s circle back to the questions one needs to answer before even starting to count trees. How about this one?

1. Why are we counting trees?

If we don’t spell out what we are trying to achieve by counting a particular set of trees, our answers to the other questions will appear completely arbitrary. Recall our definition of a tree:

a tree is defined as a plant with bark that is at least 4″ in diameter when measured 18″ off the ground.

This definition excludes, among other things:

One kind of grass tree

• banana trees
• bonsai trees
• trees 3.5″ in diameter 18″ above the ground
• trees less than 18″ tall
• Smaller Japanese maple trees

…and on and on. Also, this definition is ambiguous in some cases:

• are palm trees considered trees?
• how about grass trees? (about 30 Australian species that are called trees, and kind of look like trees…)
• is a sucker – a secondary growth out of the base or roots of a larger tree – counted separately or not?

…and so on. I am drawing your attention to two facts about the very roots of this tree-counting business:

• The definitions and rules (and procedures, and validations processes, and team selection process and so on) are, essentially, arbitrary. The people behind the counting effort get to make them up, pretty much, to achieve whatever end they have in mind.
• There are any number of reasonable objections or counter definitions to these procedures and definitions. More generally, people may be, and probably would be, baffled by the details. So a willowy 10′ tree is not a tree because its trunk is under 4″ in diameter 18″ off the ground? What? That’s a tree! You’re playing games!

So now imagine hearing, from a guy in a lab coat: there are exactly 438 trees on this suburban block. Well? How many trees, in your opinion, are on that block? Anything else you’d like to know before committing to a number?

Next, we’ll deal with the physical process of counting trees.

How Many Trees? Understanding Science 101, part 1

(I wish Mike Flynn was still with us! His feedback on the following would be appreciated. RIP, Mike!)

The following hypothetical is both a test and lesson in how science works – when it works.

Suppose a grant exists to pay people to count the tree in certain suburban blocks. Teams are assembled to do the counting. First point: if you think this an easy or trivial project, you really don’t get science at all – lucky for you, you are in the condition that this essay is trying to help!

Everybody agree that that’s a tree right there?

Let’s list some of the questions anyone given this task would need to know before beginning to count trees:

1. What counts as a tree?
2. What are the limits of suburban block?

Slightly more advanced:

1. What about trees on the border? Do we count them if they hang into the block, or are mostly in the block, ignore them if they are not entirely in the block, or what?
2. Are the streets that border the block included? There may be trees in the medians, do we count those?
3. Over what timeframe is the counting to be done? Trees grow and die, such that if we take much time on this, there’s a good chance a tree we counted at the beginning will be dead before we reach the end.

Can you think of any more? Good scientist spend a lot of time getting questions like this very clear before they ever get started.

Next, let’s attempt to answer the first two questions in order:

1. For purposes of this study, perhaps a tree is defined as a plant with bark that is at least 4″ in diameter when measured 18″ off the ground.

Sound good? The bark specification rules out banana trees and – palm trees? Do they have bark? It appears we need a definition of ‘bark’ as well, or another definition of ‘tree’ that doesn’t rely on ‘bark’ as a distinguishing characteristic.

We also now know that we’re not counting anything under 18″ tall, because we won’t be able to measure its diameter as specified above. So a cypress tree bent to the ground will not count as a tree if the trunk does not at some point get 18″ off the ground. And then, if it did, we’d be measuring it sideways – is that OK?

Note also that this definition excludes all the young trees – a 10′ tall oak or maple tree might be less than 4″ in diameter 18″ off the ground – and I’m thinking most people would still call it a tree. But not us. Is that really what we mean to do?

On a slope, are we measuring the 18″ height from the low side, the high side, or the middle, or averaging, or what? Plus, some trees have a bit of an oval cross section. Do we measure diameter once one way, then again at 90 degrees from the first measurement? Take the longer, the shorter, or the average?

1. The block is defined as the area included within four specific intersecting streets. The streets and their medians are excluded from this count. Trees must be completely within the block as defined above to be counted.

Let’s pause here. I hope it’s clear that if you sent out 10 teams to count the trees in a specified block before getting very clear on at least those first two questions, you are most likely going to get 10 different counts. I mean, out here in California, one is likely to come across little tiny ‘volunteer’ trees everywhere. A 6″ tall oak is still an oak tree, right? And privet – a tree? If so, how many trees are in a privet hedge? And so on.

But what might not be clear is that, even if we answer the first two questions in detail to everyone’s satisfaction, we’re still likely to get as many different counts as there are teams doing the counting. We’ll get there in part 2.

Sunday Compost Pile

Like a Sunday potpourri, but more earthy-smelling.

A. Do we live in a simulation? Short answer: No. Longer answer: Almost certainly not, in the sense that it’s not a logical impossibility but makes some far-fetched assumptions contrary to fact.

Once read a book by Buckminster Fuller in which he made the following observation, upon which he produced a graph and made a prediction: the fastest a human being could travel 10,000 years ago was however fast he could run. (Usain Bolt can do 27.33 MPH over 100 meters). Then, some men tamed horses, and then the fastest speed at which a human can travel rose to about 55 miles per hour (over short distances). Eventfully, men built trains, then, in quick succession, cars, planes, jets, rockets, each faster than the last.

So Fuller put that on a graph, and it’s a hockey stick: men have being able to move faster and faster, and the rate of increase is getting steeper and steeper….

Therefore, Fuller concludes, well before the year 2000, men shall be traveling faster then the speed of light. It’s simple logic…

Instead, the fastest anyone has ever traveled were a couple of astronauts – in 1969.

The crew of NASA’s Apollo 10 moon mission reached a top speed of 24,791 mph (39,897 kph) relative to Earth as they rocketed back to our planet on May 26, 1969. That’s the fastest any human beings have ever traveled. 

Space.com

25,000 MPH comes out to about 0.0037% of the speed of light.

So – nope. Extrapolating trends that involve simply assuming problems will be solved is a chump’s game. In order for us to be living in a simulation, all the issues with AI must be assumed solved, as well as any limits on processing power and memory. But there are (intractable, if not metaphysically impossible) issues with AI that have not been solved; there are real limits to processing power and storage. The burden is on those who assume such problems will be solved. It’s fantasy, just like warp drive.

B. Insane Brick Project II: Electric Boogaloo lives! I’m cruising Craig’s List for people who want to get rid of bricks, and earlier in the week contacted a guy an hour’s drive away who had several hundred decent looking bricks to give away – he said some guy had already claimed them, but only could take half in his vehicle but said he’d come back for the rest, and he let me know if that fell through. Another guy was local, but he said he only had about 50 bricks. The picture showed a mortar encrusted mess. He had them stacked by the curb, with a ‘Free’ sign on them – and nobody had taken them. Not a good sign.

After a day went by, I had a chance to drive by, and, in the immortal words of the Black Knight, I’ve had worse. Even though the brickwork looked pretty modern – bad, because the quality of mortar has improved over time until it’s often harder than the bricks, and thus next to impossible to get off – the mortar was weak. And the dude had underestimated the number by half. So I grabbed my first 100+ so-so but useable bricks.

Then, on Saturday morning, texted the guy who said he’d get back to me if the first guy failed to come back for the rest of the bricks. Nope, guy didn’t show. So now I’m working around a granddaughter’s 2nd birthday party to drive for an hour to get some bricks.

Aside: ‘Free’ generally means driving, picking up each brick 4 times – once to put in the wheelbarrow, once to move from the wheelbarrow to the van, once to take from the van to the wheelbarrow, and once more from the wheelbarrow to a stack, and then once more, minimum, to clean off any mortar. ‘Free’.

When I get there, way more than the couple hundred bricks I’d expected. +/- 436 bricks! But almost no mortar! These are good free bricks!

So now I have something over 540 bricks. I can start the pizza oven any time I want! Wheee!

I am posting picture of bricks on the internet. I am nuts. To the left: two nice neat stacks adding up to exactly 200 bricks; to the right, a pile o’ bricks what need cleaning. There are 236 +/- bricks still in the van, but it’s raining and we’re headed for Mass, so they can wait. (for reference: 250 standard bricks is about the max a Dodge minivan can haul.)

Today, saw someone giving away a ton (probably literally) of stones. Nice, roughly rectangular stones good for building, say, a drystone bridge, or a fancy wall. If only I had a forklift and a flatbed! (nope, NOPE, not going there…)

C. Speaking of Mass, today, at another parish, we sang Shelter Me, O God – no, not that one, the other one by Bob Hurd:

While the music is insipid, I wanted to like this song for the strong references to God and our need of His mercy and protection – right up until “through the needle’s eye of death”. What? The only references in Scripture to a needles eye is in Matthew 19:24, Mark 10:25, and Luke 18:25, all of which make the famous reference to it being easier for a camel to pass through a needle’s eye than for a a rich man enter the kingdom of God. What in the world could it even mean to call death a needle’s eye? Sorry to break it to you, Bob, but death is the widest, easiest road of all – everybody gets to do it! A chorus line of camels could walk it sideways.

Another case of the lyrics to modern-ish (this dinosaur is from 1984) church song not making any sense. Don’t these people have editors?

D. First serious rain of the season. Given the Hunga Tonga eruption last year, one can hope that last year’s near epic rainfall (near, because this is what epic rainfall looks like in CA) is repeated this year. My pastures could use the water, and anything that shuts up the panic and doom mongers even a little is a good thing.

I’m a good husband! I swapped out all the wiper blades on our 3 vehicles just today! We’re all set.

Remembering Mike Flynn

May he rest in peace. His death was reported here by his daughter. Here’s some writing on or about the OFloinn, AKA Ye Olde Statistician:

First, I’ve never been disappointed when simply surfing around on his blog. He just tossed off any number of great little essays and comments. That said, the essential Flynn non-fiction must start with his epic account of Galileo’s trail: The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown. Not so much debunking the traditional story of poor old Galileo’s run in with the Church, as providing epic background context and making many of the people involved into real people, not cartoon cutout villains and heroes. Great place to start. I am indebted to him for making the Galileo story much more clear, and filling in the blanks (which made up the majority of my understanding) on the rise of heliocentrism.

Mr. Flynn also took a crack at straightening out the hysterical modern mythology on Hypatia. An old lady who taught at Alexandria as a sort of freelance scholar, had many devoted former students, and got herself killed as one of may victims of the endless political violence that characterized Alexandria for centuries. Not a scientist in any modern sense, not a martyr for modern feminism.

L’audace, toujours l’audace in which he explains courage, sloth, and the nature of human being.

In general, it’s fun to simply use the search function at his blog The TOF Spot and see what comes up. He has explored rich veins of history, especially history of science.

Here are my reviews of some of his books and stories going back over a dozen years, with links to where you can find them:

• A brief review of Captive Dreams, This is one of my favorite sets of shorter fiction by any author.
• Firestar, in which I pretend it’s about Elon Musk
• The Wreck of the River of Stars, wherein Mr. Flynn sets himself to imagining what solar/mag sails would really be like, and what would happen if steam engines some faster way of travelling in the solar system makes them obsolete. A beautifully written and very sad story.
• Eifelheim. This may be his best book; it leaves one with lots to think about. Epic SciFi concepts. What if First Contact was made in the mid-14th century, on the eve of the Black Death, in a small village in Germany? What if aliens ran into a well trained Thomist? These are just two of many fascinating ideas Flynn explores in this book.
• Nexsus. An hilarious short story from Analog, showing Flynn at his wackiest. Super fun read.

In putting this post together, I find I have well over 100 posts where Mike Flynn is involved to one degree or another – comments on one of his posts or books, using one of his elegant arguments, or otherwise dragging him in where angels might fear to tread. And that’s not counting the hundreds of times he commented here. What a blessing to have made even merely his digital acquaintance! What a kind and intelligent man!

He’s with the Incredible Marge now – no surprise that a man who truly loves his wife doesn’t often last too long in this vale of tears once she’s gone. May the angels and saints welcome him to his final rest.