Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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by Otto E. Rössler, Faculty of Science, University of Tübingen, Auf der Morgenstelle 14, 72076 Tübingen, Germany

Abstract: An unfamiliar result in special relativity is presented: non-conservation of rest mass. It implies as a corollary a resolution of the Ehrenfest paradox. The new result is inherited by general relativity. It changes the properties of black holes. (June 21, 2012)

Rest mass is conserved in special relativity in the absence of acceleration. Under this condition, the well-known relativistic increase of total mass with speed is entirely due to the momentum part of the total-mass formula, so rest mass stays invariant as is well known. However, the presence of acceleration changes the picture. Two cases in point are the constant-acceleration rocketship of Einstein’s equivalence principle of 1907, and the rotating disk of Einstein’s friend Ehrenfest 5 years later.

First the Einstein rocket:

If light emitted from a point close to the tip of the constantly accelerating rocketship arrives with its finite speed at the bottom, it is blueshifted there because the bottom has in the meantime picked up a constant upwards speed. This at first sight absurd implication of special relativity was spotted by Einstein in 1907 in a famous mental tour de force. The arriving photons possessed their higher frequency from the beginning. Since they were at equilibrium with the local masses at their point of origin (think of positronium-annihilation generated photons being used), all masses at their height of origin are increased by the pertinent blueshift factor with respect to the same masses residing at the bottom. The converse argument holds true in the other direction for the redshift of photons from the bottom arriving at the tip, and for the correspondingly lower relative rest mass of all stationary particles at the bottom.

Second the Ehrenfest disk:

If light emitted from a more peripheral point of the constantly rotating disk arrives at the motionless center, it is redshifted by the transverse Doppler-shift factor discovered by Einstein in 1905. Much as in the previous case, the emitted photons are locally inter-transformable with solid rest mass. The implied local decrease in rest mass entails a proportional size increase via the Bohr radius formula of quantum mechanics (the parallel size change went unmentioned in the preceding case). But this is not the end of the story: Simultaneously, Lorentz contraction holds true at the light-emitting point on the rotating disk. The two local size change factors – that of the transverse Doppler shift and that of Lorentz contraction – happen to be each other’s inverses. Since they thus cancel out (the ratio is unity), the rotating disk remains perfectly flat. This prediction, deduced from special relativity with acceleration included, solves the Ehrenfest paradox.

To conclude:

Rest mass is not conserved in “special relativity with acceleration included.” Rest mass decreases more downstairs (or outwards, respectively) in proportion to the so-called gravitational (or rotational, respectively) redshift factor. This proposed new result in special relativity is bound to carry over to general relativity. Indeed the gravitational-redshift proportional reduction of rest mass has been described in general relativity by Richard J. Cook (in his 2009 arXiv paper “Gravitational space dilation”). The non-constancy of rest mass despite the fact that it appears locally un-changed has a tangible consequence: it affects the properties of black holes. The implications are incisive enough to let a currently running attempt at producing black holes on earth appear contraindicated from the point of view of planetary survival. This fact makes it desirable to find a flaw in the above chain of reasoning. (For J.O.R.)

A Future of Fewer Words? Five Trends Shaping the Future of Language
By Lawrence Baines
Published in 2012 in THE FUTURIST 46(2), 42–47.

Summary: Natural selection is as much a phenomenon in human language as it is in natural ecosystems. An ongoing “survival of the fittest” may lead to continuing expansion of image-based communications and the extinction of more than half the world’s languages by this century’s end.

Just after I moved to Oklahoma three years ago, I was invited to a meeting of the state’s Department of Education to discuss Native American languages. I learned that, of the 37 or so Native American languages represented in the state, 22 are already extinct. The last speakers of the Delaware and Mesquakie tongues had recently died; several other languages had only one or two speakers left.

Vanishing languages are not unique to Oklahoma. K. David Harrison, author of When Languages Die (Oxford University Press, 2008), estimates that, of the 6,900 or so languages spoken on the planet, more than half are likely to become extinct over the next century. Today, 95% of people speak one of just 400 languages. The other 6,509 languages are unevenly distributed among the remaining 5%. Hundreds of languages, most with only a few speakers still living, are teetering on oblivion at this very moment.

Why are the world’s languages disappearing? Like living organisms, languages morph over time in response to continuous evolutionary pressures. Any language is in serious trouble if it is spoken by few people or is confined to a remote geographic area. Many of the languages in northeastern Asia, for example, are in isolated, inhospitable regions where low birthrates and high morbidity rates have been facts of life for hundreds of years.

Geography and Distribution of Languages and Speakers

Geographic isolation is a problem that Oklahoma’s dying Native American languages have in common. For example, speakers of Ottawa, of which there may be only three still living Oklahoma, live in the northeastern part of the state, a location that draws few tourists and little business. If the remaining speakers of Ottawa are still alive, there is a good chance that they are over age 70 and rarely travel outside of the community. Anyone who would want to learn the Ottawa language would have to journey down dirt roads and knock on some unfamiliar doors to find out where these speakers live. Once you arrived on their doorstep, they still might not talk to you, especially if you are not a member of the tribe.

In New Guinea, a country that hosts a cauldron of language diversity, villagers on one side of a mountain often speak a completely different language from villagers who may live less than a kilometer away on the other side. If travel to a geographic location is difficult or interactions with speakers of other languages is restricted, then a language has no way to flourish. Like a plant that receives no pollination, a language without some kind of interaction eventually dies.

A second factor contributing to a language’s health is its social desirability. In some parts of the United States, children of first-generation immigrants often grow up in English-speaking neighborhoods, go to English-speaking schools, and come to think of English as the language of acceptance and power. Some of my Texas friends whose parents emigrated from Mexico do not know how to speak, read, or write in Spanish. One friend told me that his parents actually forbade him from speaking Spanish when he was growing up because they considered mastery of English to be essential for success in America.

According to the Global Language Monitor (www.languagemonitor.com, 2011), almost 2 billion people around the globe speak English as either a first or second language, making it the most widely spoken language in the history of the world. The closest runner-up is Mandarin Chinese, with roughly 1 billion speakers, the majority located in or around China. Spanish is the third most widely spoken language, with 500 million speakers, while speakers of Hindi and Arabic come in at fourth and fifth respectively, with between 450 million and 490 million speakers.

French was the most popular language in the world in 1800, but today, Spanish speakers outnumber French speakers worldwide by more than a 2:1 margin. English speakers outnumber French speakers by 10:1.

As the table below shows, 10 languages constitute a combined 82% of all content and traffic on the Internet. Six of them—English, Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, French, and Russian—also happen to be the six “official” languages of the United Nations. The ubiquity of these languages on the Internet, and in international relations and commerce, assures their advance for the foreseeable future.

Languages Represented on the Internet, 2011 est.

Language

Number of Users

Percent of Total Users

Percent Increase, 2000–2011

English

565 million

27%

301%

Chinese

510 million

24

1,478

Spanish

165 million

8

807

Japanese

99 million

5

110

Portuguese

83 million

4

990

German

75 million

4

174

Arabic

65 million

3

2,501

French

60 million

3

398

Russian

60 million

3

1,825

Korean

39 million

2

107

Source: Internet World Stats, www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm

Trend 1: Images Are Subverting Words

Not only is the world using fewer languages on a daily basis, but it is also using fewer words. Consider the rich vocabulary and complex sentence constructions in extemporaneous arguments of politicians in earlier centuries against the slick, simplistic sound bites of contemporary times. No politician today speaks like Thomas Jefferson, whose 1801 inaugural address began with the following two sentences: “Called upon to undertake the duties of the first Executive office of our country, I avail myself of the presence of that portion of my fellow citizens which is here assembled to express my grateful thanks for the favor with which they have been pleased to look towards me, to declare a sincere consciousness that the task is above my talents, and that I approach it with those anxious and awful presentiments which the greatness of the charge, and the weakness of my powers so justly inspire. A rising nation, spread over a wide and fruitful land, traversing all the seas with the rich productions of their industry, engaged in commerce with nations who feel power and forget right, advancing rapidly to destinies beyond the reach of mortal eye; when I contemplate these transcendent objects, and see the honour, the happiness, and the hopes of this beloved country committed to the issue and the auspices of this day, I shrink from the contemplation & humble myself before the magnitude of the undertaking.”

During the nineteenth century, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas debated for hours in open, public arenas around the country. An examination of their spontaneous verbal sparring reveals dexterous vocabulary and complex thought processes delivered in speeches loaded with clarity and wit. In contrast, during the 2004 presidential campaign, George W. Bush’s campaign logo for the election was a simple W alongside an American flag, an essentially wordless communiqué.

The move from language to image is perhaps most apparent in advertisements, which increasingly emphasize sound and image to the exclusion of language. A winner of the 2010 CLIO award for the best commercial of the year was Volkswagen, whose commercial featured a series of rapid close-ups of a man and woman intimately dancing to rap music, followed in the last few seconds by a picture of a car and just two words: “Tough. Beautiful.”

To help encourage communication among tribes who have been long-time rivals, organizations working in Tanzania, where 129 “official languages” exist, have turned to images, not words, to try to get the tribes to communicate with one another. As John Wesley Young reports in Totalitarian Language (University of Virginia, 1992), translators in these organizations have found that trying to find a common language was cumbersome and fraught with unexpected problems, such as the “loaded connotations” of words like comrade and enemy. To de-escalate tensions, translators try to establish communications using only images, which require no intermediary translation and are not as encumbered by pejoration.

Trend 2: The Written Word Is Losing Authority

In the Bible, John 1:1 begins, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” In Isaiah 48:13, God says, “By my word, I have founded the earth.”

In Christianity, as in most religions, holy words are assumed to have potency well beyond human comprehension, and the mere utterance of a holy word is assumed to have mystical power. J. K. Rowling borrowed this aspect of religious texts in writing the Harry Potter series of books, where her characters are often too fearful to even mention “him that need not be named” (Voldemort).

To get a sense of the power of words in earlier times, it is instructive to read the literate stirrings of a sixteenth-century Italian peasant named Domenico Scandella and his attempt to understand the Bible on his own terms. Scandella’s interpretation of the world as a ball of cheese infested with worms (angels) was considered blasphemous by the priests of the local Catholic Diocese, and he was thrown in prison several times over the course of his life, eventually dying there.

The Church assumed that Scandella’s linguistic interpretation could influence other parishioners in nefarious ways, so it silenced him. Today, thousands of political dissidents around the world are imprisoned on the same principle—that a few well-chosen words have the potency to change society.

The power of words is also substantiated by endless volumes of legal documents. In most countries, an agreement between individuals may be binding only if it is in writing and features the signatures of all involved. In courts of law, the presence of written documentation trumps oral agreements.

With the proliferation of electronic documents, clicking “I ACCEPT” has become equivalent to a written signature. Software programs downloaded from the Internet whose long, legal agreements momentarily flash upon a computer screen, are, in actuality, legally binding documents. In this manner, “proof of click” is replacing the multi-page, hand-signed documents in the legal system.

At first blush, the popularity of texting might be construed as a sort of affirmation for writing. Upon closer inspection, text messages and e-mails have more in common with oral language than written language. Text messages are usually spontaneous, one-shot efforts, written with little to no revision, often in response to a previous communication. They may include pauses (communicated through additional spaces or …), facial expressions (communicated through emoticons such as ;D for a wink and a smile), simple vocabulary, and recursive, sometimes incoherent construction, all of which are characteristics of oral language. Not surprisingly, text messages are generated by a device originally designed for speaking—a telephone.

Some texts are tweets, which are limited to 140 characters. Obviously, a 140-character limit restricts both linguistic complexity and sentence length. Few tweeters are likely to become the next William Faulkner, who commonly used more than 140 words (not characters) in a single sentence.

The cell phone has become a ubiquitous, all-purpose communications tool. However, its small keyboard and tiny screen limit the complexity, type, and length of written messages. Because no sane person wants to read streams of six-point font on a three-inch video screen, phones today are built with menus of images up to the presentation point of the messages themselves.

Trend 3: Changing Environment for Words

Most public libraries around the world are transforming from institutions focused on archives and research to centers for information and entertainment. The old conception of the library, with its mammoth, unabridged dictionary, ordered sets of reference books, and collections of bounded materials, has become a relic. Now most libraries feature large open spaces with Wi-Fi access, plenty of computer terminals, and as many film DVDs and audio CDs as can be purchased on a dwindling budget. Most libraries today spend more on non-print media than on books and magazines. In my local, college-town library, the computer stations always have a line of patrons waiting to log on, and the DVD aisles are packed with browsers, while the book stacks are relatively deserted.

Libraries are simply responding to changes in human behavior. In 1996, Americans spent more time reading than using the Internet. The following year, time spent on the Internet eclipsed reading, and the gap between reading and Internet usage has been expanding every year since. On a typical weekend, when individuals can choose how to fill their time, they read for about five minutes and they watch television, socialize, text, click around the Internet, and play video games for about five hours. In other words, the ratio of time spent with electronic media to time spent reading has ballooned to 60:1.

Research by the Kaiser Foundation found that adolescents, who are particularly heavy users of electronic media, pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes of media content into seven and a half hours of media interactions per day. In his book Everything Bad Is Good for You (Riverhead, 2005), Steven Johnson observes that electronic media have been shown to enhance student decision-making processes, to improve hand–eye coordination, and to promote collaborative thinking. However, most electronic media do not build vocabulary, enhance reading comprehension, or improve the quality of writing.

Television shows, even critically acclaimed series, are notoriously simplistic in their use of language. Script analyses of popular television shows such as South Park, 24, CSI, American Idol, and Friday Night Lights, all reveal a preponderance of monosyllabic words and short sentences.

Language simplification is apparent in cinema, as well. Film scripts from Avatar, Planet of the Apes, Transformers, Lord of the Rings, and Star Wars are written at a second- or third-grade readability level. The basic unit of communication for film is the image, with music and special effects playing significant, supplementary roles. Words serve only as minor support.

The move toward grander spectacle through computer-generated images moves film even more toward the visual and farther away from the linguistic. The complete dialogue for the first Terminator film, which served as a harbinger for a new era of special effects, is just 3,850 words—about as long as this magazine article.

Trend 4: Effects of Neural Darwinism

Nobel Prize winning neuroscientist Gerald Edelman postulated that the brain constantly undergoes a “survival of the fittest” process, in which cells respond to environmental stimuli and, in turn, battle for dominance. Thus, avid readers build parts of their brains that are associated with reading while those parts of the brain associated with other tasks, such as hand–eye coordination (exercised during the playing of video games, for example), stabilize or atrophy. This “neural Darwinism,” the constant fight for dominance in the brain, is evident even in very young children. The stimuli that newborns choose to pay attention to will strengthen the circuits and synapses in the brain related to the stimuli. If certain parts of the brain are not stimulated, that part of the brain will not develop.

More than 20 years ago, neuroscientist Marian Diamond noted that enriched environments increase the size of the cortex at any age. Incredibly, detectable increases in cortical development become apparent after only four days.

The hypotheses of Edelman and Diamond have been confirmed in non-laboratory settings by sociologists Betty Hart and Todd Risley, who did studies of language use among parents and children in professional and welfare homes. The sociologists observed that, by age 3, children in professional homes had twice the vocabularies of children in welfare homes.

To find out why, they recorded oral exchanges between parent and children in both environments and found that professional parents averaged 487 utterances per hour with their children with a ratio of positive to negative comments of 6:1 (six positive comments for every one negative comment). On the other hand, in welfare homes, parents only averaged 178 utterances per hour with a ratio of positive to negative comments of 1:2 (one positive comment for every two negative comments).

By age 3, the average IQ of children of professional parents was 117; the average IQ of children of welfare parents was 79. Thus, much of the achievement gap may be attributable to impoverished environments in the early years.

In a more recent Carnegie Mellon University study, psychologists Timothy A. Keller and Marcel Adam Just took PET images (Positron Emission Tomography) of the brains of children who were poor readers, and then offered the children 100 hours of intensive “reading therapy” designed to improve reading effectiveness. Upon the conclusion of the 100 hours of therapy, the students showed significant improvements in their ability to read. When photographs were taken of the children’s brains after the 100 hours of therapy, the physical structure of their brains had changed to look more like the brains of avid readers.

As the world recedes from the written word and becomes inundated with multisensory stimuli (images, sound, touch, taste, and smell), the part of the human brain associated with language will regress. While there are benefits to becoming more visually astute and more aurally discriminating, the areas of the brain associated with language are also associated with critical thinking and analysis. So, as the corpus of language shrinks, the human capacity for complex thinking may shrink with it.

Trend 5: Translating Machines

Imagine a hand-held device that can translate simple phrases into any of several foreign languages. You type a phrase in your native language and the machine instantly translates and pronounces the desired phrase in the target language. Actually, such a machine already exists and may be purchased for about $50.

While today’s machine translators are not perfect, they are surprisingly functional. Most rely on translation algorithms that depend upon the most commonly occurring words in a language. Plain-language-in and plain-language-out enhances the probability that a word is contained in the database of the device and is understandable by the listener. An erudite translation could result in misunderstanding and confusion. That is, the machine is programmed explicitly for the most common words and phrases.

The inevitable proliferation and technological improvements of translating devices will mean more plainspeak, more monosyllabic words, and fewer polysyllabic words. As world commerce continues to expand and the need to communicate in several languages becomes a standard expectation, the emphasis will be on functionality—a few, useful words and durable phrases. Again, the universe of words seems destined to shrink.

The Rise and Fall of Languages, and What Comes Next

Foreign-language courses in K-12 schools and colleges used to focused upon culture as much as language. Students would study the government, religion, history, customs, foods, and etiquette of a country as much as its language. Today, foreign-language teaching is moving away from cultural awareness and toward language as a transaction. If you own a factory in Norway and you want to export your products to Vietnam, it would be in your best interest to become competent in Vietnamese as quickly as you can. What level of competency do you need to achieve your goals? How long will it take to get there? When the enterprise in Vietnam dries up, then the urgency to learn Vietnamese ceases to exist. While the loss of cultural transmission is lamentable, the focus on functionality is understandable, especially in light of widening international trade.

The reverberations of the shift from words as the dominant mode of communication to image-based media are becoming apparent. As we click more and write less, the retreat of polysyllabic words, particularly words with complex or subtle meanings, seems inevitable. The rich vocabulary in books occurs in the exposition, not the dialogue. When a book is adapted for film, a video game, or a television series, the exposition is translated into images, so the more complex language never reaches the ears of the audience. Media associated with the print world (books, magazines, newspapers) are the repositories of sophisticated language, so as individuals read less, they will have less exposure to sophisticated language.

Losing polysyllabic words will mean a corresponding loss of eloquence and precision. Today, many of the most widely read texts emanate from blogs and social networking sites, such as Facebook. Authors of these sites may be non-readers who have little knowledge of effective writing and may have never developed an ear for language. Over the next century, a rise in “tone deaf” writing seems certain.

Finally, more and more languages will disappear from the face of the planet, and world languages will coalesce into pidgin dialects as communication among cultures continues to accelerate. There will be an ongoing “survival of the fittest” battle among languages. If a language is not needed for commerce, identity, or communication, then it will shrink and possibly die.

The French novelist Gustave Flaubert once wrote, “Human language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to.” As images replace words, they will foster faster comprehension, enable easier communication, support stronger retention, and stimulate new ways of thinking. The possible consequences of the contraction of written communication are difficult to discern, but ready or not, the age of the image is upon us.

No scientist on the planet claims to be able to prove my “Telemach theorem” wrong (you find it by adding the second keyword “African”). Only anonymous bloggers express malice against it. The anonymous writers’ attitude is a logical consequence of the fact that CERN and Europe openly continue in defiance of my (and not only mine) results. This allegiance shown is no wonder: most everyone is ready to defend their own trusted government. And is it not unlikely indeed that a revered multinational organization like CERN should make a terminal blunder of this magnitude?

In the remaining half year of operation of CERN’s nuclear collider, before the planned 75-percent up-scaling scheduled to take two years’ time, the cumulative yield of artificial BLACK HOLES will grow by a factor of about 4 if everything works out optimal. So the cumulative risk to the planet will be quintupled during the next 6 months. This is all uncontested.

Of course, most everyone is sure that I have to be wrong with my published proof of danger: That black holes, (i) arise more readily than originally hoped-for by CERN, (ii) are undetectable to CERN’s detectors and (iii) will, with the slowest specimen generated, eat the earth inside out after a refractory period of a few years. “This is bound to be ridiculous!” is a natural response.

This attitude is something I cannot understand. I predict that no one will understand it in the near future. The logically necessary safety conference (see my Honey-I-shrunk-the-earth “petitiontoCERN” of April 2008) cannot possibly be considered to be more frightening than the danger that it is meant to dispel. How can anyone defend the decision not to have a look???

There must be a few readers seeing this post. Can you, my dear few, find a journalist of standing who dares ask his own readers whether or not they support the globe-wide decision not to report? For example, some lonely individual is responsible for putting this text familiar to me: http://www.traxarmstrong.com/2011/12/20/young-telemach-saves-planet/ anonymously on the Internet. There are nice people around! What is needed is a medium like the New York Times to take up the story of “The Biggest Cover-up of History Committed out of Fear the Message Is true.”

Imagine: fearing the readers’ scorn for belated reporting more than having to watch one’s children die. No one says he or she is sure Rössler is wrong. So why suppress this fact?

It is a platitude that the world is growing smaller. Whether reading through Frances Cairncross’s ”The Death of Distance” or Thomas Friedman’s “The World is Flat” one gets the impression that the growth of new technologies which link us together reduces distance between us and makes the world smaller, more connected. Although it is hard to imagine how seven billion people could ever be a single group, a global village, there will be few objections if I say that “technology is making the world smaller” at a cocktail party.

But that assumption is not necessarily true. Let me make two different, related points.

First, although you can easily travel from Delhi to Seoul, from Johannesburg to Berlin, physical movement is not the equivalent of communication and deep exchange. Increasingly individuals travel around the world with great ease, but stay at remarkably uniform hotels and eat in quite similar restaurants where ever their travels take them. When it comes to deep conversations and close personal relations, although the amount may be increasing, it is not obvious that greater global travel makes for close personal ties. There is a global class who move everywhere, but they are increasingly more related to each other than to the countries in which they live. As I wrote in “The Frankenstein Alliance,” Washington D.C. and Beijing have more in common with each other than with rural regions of their own respective countries.

In fact I would argue, as I have previously, that one of the great challenges we face is the growing gap between the rate at which the world is integrated in terms of logistics and trade, the exchange of natural resources, or the circulation of money and the rate at which individuals in the various nations of the world establish relations, or build global institutions, to parallel those physical steps towards integration.

If we look at East Asia one hundred years ago, we see that travel was difficult and such conveniences as phones did not exist. Yet the depth of intellectual exchange between certain scholars and policy makers was quite impressive, perhaps one might even say “deeper” than just about any discussion going on today. There is clearly a loss.

The other serious issue is whether the growth of computer power is pulling us together, or fragmenting us further, reducing the distance between us, or creating even greater distance between us. The jury is still out, and I would suggest that perhaps both phenomena are taking place simultaneously.

Let me put it another way: the distance between Washington D.C. in terms of travel time has been reduced, and SKYPE has made it irrelevant. At the same time the actual distance between one office in the Pentagon and another office has so increased, in a bureaucratic sense, as to be measured in light years. We find individuals in such global organizations to be linked together through enormous mazes of supercomputers that create distance and complexity. Such supercomputers, if we can imagine them as organisms, have no incentive to simplify the situation and every reason to want to make it more complex, more convoluted. Bureaucracy is in a sense traditionally a product of technology. The technology surrounding the storage and transfer of the written word. Today, however, supercomputers, that dark mass out there that impacts every aspect of our daily life but is almost beyond our awareness, have created their own “hyper-bureaucracy” that complicates just about everything, slowing down the process by which decisions for most things are made and speeding up just certain tasks that are required for a computer’s global agenda.

We could also say that the essential problem is an excess of information. That the supply of information generated by computers, rather than simply tasks, can make them more difficult. There is some validity in that argument.

The most inspired and trenchant author, Neil Postman, wrote at length about the problem of information in his most thoughtful book

Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (Vintage Books, 1993)

Postman suggests that we are entering an age in which technology itself dominates all levels of discourse, and even the manner in which men try to think, creating enormous blindness, and great risk. Although I think that Postman ultimately overstates the case, he has grasped something essential.

Postman writes,

” The relationship between information and the mechanisms for its control is fairly simple to describe: Technology increases the available supply of information. As the supply is increased, control mechanisms are strained. Additional control mechanisms are needed to cope with the new information. When additional control mechanisms are themselves technical, they in turn further increase the supply of information. When the supply of information is no longer controllable, a general breakdown in psychic tranquillity and social purpose occurs. Without defenses, people have no way of finding meaning in thier experiences, lose their capacity to remember, and have difficulty imagining reasonable futures.”

This state at which the supply of information is no longer controlled, and individuals can no longer judge what information is relevant, what is meaningful, is becoming increasingly common. It is quite dangerous in part because the value of the information that the individual receives seems debased. We are subject to, as I commented in my paper on “Non-Traditional Security Threats” a Gresham’s Law of information. The original Gresham’s Law states that debased currency will replaced pure currency. If you circulate coins that are 90% gold and coins that are 10% gold, in short time you will have a situation in which only coins that are 10% gold in circulation.

It is not simply that bad information is circulated, although that does happen too, but rather that so much information is circulated that the value of any piece of information, no matter how important, is reduced as a result. I am reminded of Andy Warhol’s series of prints “Car Crash.” Warhol took a gruesome photograph of a fatal automobile accident and made a collage in which the photo is repeated many times. The effect is that the horror of the image is much reduced and it becomes little more than a pattern for the observer.

Postman returns to describe his dystopia “Technopoly” as a flood of uncontrolled information:

“One way of defining Technopoly, then, is to say it is what happens to society when the defenses against information glut have broken down. It is what happens when institutional life becomes inadequate to cope with too much information. It is what happens when a culture, overcome by information generated by technology, tried to employ technology itself as a means of providing clear direction and humane purpose. The effort is mostly doomed to failure. Though it is sometimes possible to use a disease as a cure for itself, this occurs only when we are fully aware of the processes by which disease is normally held in check. My purpose here is to describe the defenses that in principle are available and to suggest how they have become dysfunctional.” (Technopoly, 72)

It is a frightening prospect. I am not convinced that Postman’s assessment is entirely correct. There are certainly parts of his book that are overstated and overly gloomy. But I would suggest that we run a very serious risk of misunderstanding the nature of the threats we face. We may imagine this threat out there in Iran or Pakistan, but in fact that threat out there is part of this greater structure in which we are embedded, a structure that continues to expand.

One quote that I particularly enjoyed from Postman’s book was this one:

“Whether or not it draws on new scientific research, technology is a branch of moral philosophy, not of science”

(Paul Goodman, New Reformation)

The implication of the quote is that how we use technology has a moral component to it. Therefore, to confuse technology with science is to lose track of the true significance of one’s actions.

Emanuel Pastreich

Professor

Kyung Hee University

June 9, 2012

The Crisis in Education in Korea and the World

The suicide of four students at KAIST in Korea last year has made it apparent that there is something fundamentally wrong with the manner in which our children are educated. It is not an issue of one test system over another, or the amount of studying students must do. Although KAIST keeps rising in its Continue reading “The Crisis in Education in Korea and the World” | >

http://www.change.org/petitions/every-government-on-the-plan…en-refuted

Mr. Ben Rattray has enabled the planet to learn about the huge danger incurred by the currently running – and till the end of 2012 three times more black holes-spouting – LHC experiment. This despite the fact that CERN’s detectors cannot detect their most anticipated products and the fact that they grow exponentially inside earth once one of them gets stuck inside. In that case, only a few years separate us from earth being a 2-cm black hole.

Please, ask around whether anyone can name a physicist who contradicts the published proof (Telemach theorem: http://www.scribd.com/doc/82752272/Rossler-s-Telemach-paper ). This physicist is automatically the most important living physicist today. Finding him and learning about the strength of his argument is the only aim of the present appeal to every citizen of the world. To help in dismantling the danger before it has risen by a factor of three.

Thank you. He or she who can contradict me most is my best friend. And yours. Let us search for this human being.

“A Constantly Receding Mass at Constant Distance Has a Lower Rest-mass and Charge”

Otto E. Rossler, University of Tubingen, Auf der Morgenstelle 14, 72076 Tubingen, Germany

This “extended gravitational redshift theorem” (EGRT) is unfortunately new even though it is true as far as anyone can tell up until now. The physics community is currently betting the planet on claiming that this result were not true. It would be gracious if a single physicist stood up saying why he thinks the theorem is not true. (For J.O.R.)

I have just watched this video by Global Futures 2045.

This is my list of things I disagree with:

It starts with scary words about how every crisis comes faster and faster. However this is untrue. Many countries have been running deficits for decades. The financial crisis is no surprise. The reason the US has such high energy costs goes back to government decisions made in the 1970s. And many things that used to be crises no longer happen, like the Black Plague. We have big problems, but we’ve also got many resources we’ve built up over the centuries to help. Much of the challenges we face are political and social, not technical.

We will never fall into a new Dark Ages. The biggest problem is that we aren’t advancing as fast as we could and many are still starving, sick, etc. However, it has always been this way. The 20th century was very brutal! But we are advancing and it is mostly known threats like WMDs which could cause a disaster. In the main, the world is getting safer every day as we better understand it.

We aren’t going to build a new human. It is more like a Renaissance. Those who lost limbs will get increasingly better robotic ones, but they will still be humans. The best reason to build a robotic arm is to attach it to a human.

The video had a collectivist and authoritarian perspective when it said:

“The world’s community and leaders should encourage mankind instead of wasting resources on solving momentary problems.”

This sentence needs to be deconstructed:

1. Government acts via force. Government’s job is to maintain civil order, so having it also out there “encouraging” everyone to never waste resources is creepy. Do you want your policeman to also be your nanny? Here is a quote from C.S. Lewis:

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

2. It is wrong to think government is the solution to our problems. Most of the problems that exist today like the Greek Debt Crisis, and the US housing crisis were caused by governments trying to do too much.

3. There is no such thing as the world’s leaders. There is the UN, which doesn’t act in a humanitarian crisis until after everyone is dead. In any case, we don’t need the governments to act. We built Wikipedia.

4. “Managing resources” is codeword for socialism. If their goal is to help with the development of new technologies, then the task of managing existing resources is totally unrelated. If your job is to build robots, then your job is not also to worry about whether the water and air are dirty. Any scientist who talks about managing resources is actually a politician. Here is a quote from Frederic Hayek:

“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. Before the obvious economic failure of Eastern European socialism, it was widely thought that a centrally planned economy would deliver not only “social justice” but also a more efficient use of economic resources. This notion appears eminently sensible at first glance. But it proves to overlook the fact that the totality of resources that one could employ in such a plan is simply not knowable to anybody, and therefore can hardly be centrally controlled.”

5. We should let individuals decide what to spend their resources on. People don’t only invest in momentary things. People build houses. In fact, if you are looking for an excuse to drink, being poor because you live in a country with 70% taxes is a good one.

The idea of tasking government to finding the solutions and to do all futuristic research and new products to shove down our throats is wrong and dangerous. We want individuals, and collections of them (corporations) to do it because they will best put it to use in ways that actually improve our lives. Everything is voluntary which encourages good customer relationships. The money will be funded towards the products people actually care about, instead of what some mastermind bureaucrat thinks we should spend money on. There are many historical examples of how government doesn’t innovate as well as the private sector: the French telephone system, Cuba, expensive corn-based ethanol, the International Space Station, healthcare. The free market is imperfect but it leads to fastest technological and social progress for the reasons Frederic Hayek has explained. A lot of government research today is wasted because it never gets put to use commercially. There are many things that can be done to make the private sector more vibrant. There are many ways government can do a better job, and all that evidence should be a warning to not use governments to endorse programs with the goal of social justice. NASA has done great things, but it was only because it existed in a modern society that it was possible.

They come up with a nice list of things that humanity can do, but they haven’t listed that the one of the most important first steps is more Linux. We aren’t going to get cool and smart robots, etc. without a lot of good free software first.

The video says:

“What we need is not just another technological revolution, but a new civilization paradigm, we need philosophy and ideology, new ethics, new culture, new psychology.”

It minimizes the technology aspect when this is the hard work by disparate scientists that will bring us the most benefits.

It is true that we need to refine our understandings of many things, but we are not starting over, just evolving. Anyone who thinks we need to start over doesn’t realize what we’ve already built and all the smart people who’ve come before. The basis of good morals from thousands of years ago still apply. It will just be extended to deal with new situations, like cloning. The general rules of math, science, and biology will remain. In many cases, we are going back to the past. The Linux and free software movement is simply returning computer software to the hundreds of years-old tradition of science. Sometimes the idea has already been discovered, but it isn’t widely used yet. It is a social problem, not a technical one.

The repeated use of the word “new”, etc. makes this video like propaganda. Cults try to get people to reset their perspective into a new world, and convince them that only they have the answers. This video comes off as a sales pitch with them as the solution to our problems, ignoring that it will take millions. Their lists of technologies are random. Some of these problems we could have solved years ago, and some we can’t solve for decades, and they mix both examples. It seems they do no know what is coming next given how disorganized they are. They also pick multiple words that are related and so are repeating themselves. Repetition is used to create an emotional impact, another trait of propaganda.

The thing about innovation and the future is that it is surprising. Many futurists get things wrong. If these guys really had the answers, they’d have invented it and made money on it. And compared to some of the tasks, we are like cavemen.

Technology evolves in a stepwise fashion, and so looking at it as some clear end results on some day in the future is wrong.

For another example: the video makes it sound like going beyond Earth and then beyond the Solar System is a two-step process when in fact it is many steps, and the journey is the reward. If they were that smart, they’d endorse the space elevator which is the only cheap way to get out there, and we can do it in 10 years.

The video suggests that humanity doesn’t have a masterplan, when I just explained that you couldn’t make one.

It also suggests that individuals are afraid of change, when in fact, that is a trait characteristic of governments as well. The government class has known for decades that Social Security is going bankrupt, but they’d rather criticize anyone who wants to reform it rather than fix the underlying problem. This video is again trying to urge collectivism with its criticism of the “mistakes” people make. The video is very arrogant at how it looks down at “the masses.” This is another common characteristic of collectivism.

Here is the first description of their contribution:

“We integrate the latest discoveries and developments from the sciences: physics, energetics, aeronautics, bio-engineering, nanotechnology, neurology, cybernetics, cognitive science.”

That sentence is laughable because it is an impossible task. To understand all of the latest advances would involve talking with millions of scientists. If they are doing all this integration work, what have they produced? They want everyone to join up today, work to be specified later.

The challenge for nuclear power is not the science, it is the lawyers who outlawed new ones in 1970s, and basically have halted all advancements in building safer and better ones. Some of these challenges are mostly political, not scientific. We need to get engineers in corporations like GE, supervised by governments, building safer and cleaner nuclear power.

If you wanted to create all of what they offer, you’d have to hire a million different people. If you were building the pyramids, you could get by with most of your workers having one skill, the ability to move heavy things around. However, the topics they list are so big and complicated, I don’t think you could build an organization that could understand it all, let alone build it.

They mention freedom and speak in egalitarian terms, but this is contradicted by their earlier words. In their world, we will all be happy worker bees, working “optimally” for their collective. Beware of masterminds offering to efficiently manage your resources.

I support discussion and debate. I am all for think-tanks and other institutions that hire scientists. However, those that lobby government to act on their behalf are scary. I don’t want every scientist lobbying the government to institute their pet plan, no matter how good it sounds. They will get so overwhelmed that they won’t be able to do their actual job. The rules of the US Federal government are very limited and generally revolve around an army and a currency. Social welfare is supposed to be handled by the states.

Some of their ideas cannot be turned into laws by the US Congress because they don’t have this authority — the States do. Obamacare is likely to be ruled unconstitutional, and their ideas are potentially much more intrusive towards individual liberty. It would require a Constitutional Amendment, which would never pass and we don’t need.

They offer a social network where scientists can plug in and figure out what they need to do. This could also be considered an actual concrete example of something they are working on. However, there are already social networks where people are advancing the future. SourceForge.net is the biggest community of programmers. There is also Github.com with 1,000,000 projects. Sage has a community advancing the state of mathematics.

If they want to create their own new community solving some aspect, that is great, especially if they have money. But the idea that they are going to make it all happen is impossible. And it will never replace all the other great communities that already exist. Even science happens on Facebook, when people chat about their work.

If they want to add value, they need to specialize. Perhaps they come up with millions of dollars and they can do research in specific areas. However, their fundamental research would very likely get used in ways they never imagined by other people. The more fundamental, the more no one team can possibly take advantage of all aspects of the discovery.

They say there is some research lab they’ve got working on cybernetics. However they don’t demonstrate any results. I don’t imagine they can be that much ahead of the rest of the world who provides them the technology they use to do their work. Imagine a competitor to Henry Ford. Could he really build a car much better given the available technology at the time? My response to anyone who has claims of some advancements is: turn it into a demo or useful product and sell it. All this video offer as evidence here is CGI, which any artist can make.

I support the idea of flying cars. First we need driverless cars and cheaper energy. Unless they are a car or airplane company, I don’t see what this organization will have to do with that task. I have nothing against futuristic videos, but they don’t make clear what is their involvement and instances of ambiguity should be noted.

They are wrong when they say we won’t understand consciousness till 2030 because we already understand it at some level today. Neural networks have been around for decades. IBM’s Jeopardy-playing Watson was a good recent example. However, it is proprietary so not much will come of that particular example. Fortunately, Watson was built on lots of free software, and the community will get there. Google is very proprietary with their AI work. Wolfram Alpha is also proprietary. Etc. We’ve got enough the technical people for an amazing world if we can just get them to work together in free software and Python.

The video’s last sentence suggests that spiritual self-development is the new possibility. But people can work on that today. And again, enlightenment is not a destination but a journey.

We are a generation away from immortality unless things greatly change. I think about LibreOffice, cars that drive themselves and the space elevator, but faster progress in biology is also possible as well if people will follow the free software model. The Microsoft-style proprietary development model has infected many fields.

Every year Médecins Sans Frontières/ Doctors Without Borders (MSF) hold a conference to present scientific research carried out by their teams from different parts of the world. This year’s conference highlighted some of the strategic challenges facing MSF, and challenged some of our conceptions of medical humanitarian aid, and international development in light of groundbreaking digital technologies. We are as Paul Conneally passionately articulated in his keynote speech – Digital Humanitarian – ‘on the cusp of a global health revolution’.

Some of the groundbreaking technologies touched upon included crisis mapping, a technology that is still in its infancy, and the era of big data. The possibilities of how healthcare and humanitarian aid will be transformed by the convergence of ideas and technologies were evident in the poster session; humanitarian technology applications showed refugee camps in Kenya being monitored using satellite imagery and a humanitarian field software kit called joekit. Of the talks demonstrating real world examples, a talk by Isabella Panunzi on teleradiology proved to be immensely inspiring.

Isabella’s talk on her experience of applying teleradiology to improve diagnosis of tuberculosis in Thyolo District Hospital, Malawi showcased humanitarian innovation at its best. X-rays are taken at the Malawi hospital and the images are then sent to radiologists in the USA to interpret the images. As a result teleradiology has reduced critical delays and missed diagnosis of TB. This example of digital humanitarianism symbolises a small fraction of what can be potentially achieved in transforming our world. It opens up new possibilities in the transfer of technology and knowledge to the developing world. It also highlights the need for a different approach to modelling the strategic challenges of medical humanitarian aid and international development, and this is where complexity thinking and science can bring together different parts of problems and solutions to construct true holistic solutions.

A talk by Jonathan Smith, lecturer in Global Health and Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases at Yale University, brought together the disciplines of the arts and sciences as he gave an inventive take on using research in the digital age. Visually documenting disease and connecting the ‘emotional component to epidemiological data’ is extremely powerful to create change in global health observed Jonathon, as he showed part of a documentary film he is directing, ‘They Go to Die’, a film about,

four former migrant gold minework­ers in South Africa and Swazi­land who have contracted drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB) and HIV while working at the gold mine. When the miners fail to improve their TB status at the mining hospital, they are sent home to rural areas of South Africa often with no continuation of care or means for treatment. This practice is often referred to as “sending them home to die” by leading health officials. The film raises concerns of disease and human rights violations uniquely though the context of life, love, and family; unlike traditional health films, it focuses on relationships and bonding, not death and disease. It is a film of uniting across cultures and paints a portrait of common humanity.

Jonathon is spearheading the Visual Epidemiology Project, a really exciting project ‘that will integrate sensory engagement (film, artistry) with academic discourse’ and ‘produce future academically valid documentaries on other global health issues.’

I feel like picking up a film camera.

The biggest challenge to the ‘ecosystem’ of world economics that keeps society ticking over is how to overcome our inability to regulate a sustainable economic model. In Europe at present we are undergoing the difficult measures in setting about rules of austerity to ensure that government borrowing never gets as out of hand as it has done on our watch. I post on this topic now as it is topical to me — back home here in my native Ireland we are voting on a referendum this week to ensure we no longer borrow from our children to fuel indulgences today — a referendum on rationality and responsibility.

The topical of austerity reminds me of an opinion I blogged on a crisis in the Obama administration last August on national debt in the light of striking comments from foreign figureheads amid the storm from the ‘Tea Party Taliban’. I share with you for to see if anyone cares to comment on an operandi of living like parasites off the global economy:

Living Like Parasites Off The Global Economy, originally written 3 Aug 2011:

With the US in turmoil over its national debt, and held to ransom by a ‘Tea Party Taliban’, last week China publicly mocked American democracy. Yesterday, the world witnessed the humbling of America after a trillion-dollar deal marked the end of an era for the US. The US now faces a shift in its relations with creditor nations, and it was not all too surprising to hear Vladimir Putin, the Russian Prime Minister, yesterday accusing Americans of living “like parasites off the global economy”. If America had defaulted on its international debt obligations, that is exactly what it would be. While America continues to service it’s debt, it is quite the opposite — for now at least- as is perpetually paying interest to its creditors.

However, one needs to look at the bigger picture. In 1980, the size of US debt was $1 Trillion. It stabilized in 1995 at $5 Trillion until 9/11 after which the gross military spending on combating dubious wars saw it rise to where it is now — $15 Trillion and rising rapidly out of control. An 11th hour rescue deal that was far less than the Obama administration wished for sees its debt ceiling rise further, though perhaps finally brought to account.

The US debt is the largest in the world. Purchasers of Treasury bills still reasonably expect the US economy to recover enough to pay them back and foreign investors like China and Japan, the US is such a large customer it is allowed to run a huge tab so it will keep buying exports. The debt is 95% of GDP, and interest alone on the debt was $414 billion in Fiscal Year 2010. One wonders when the US is going to pay it all back. It is reasonable to anticipate that sooner or later, an 11th hour rescue package, like the one negotiated with The Tea Party Taliban this week, will not be there to save the US from defaulting on its debt, at which point the US will have proven itself to be a parasite on the world stage — one that borrows and declines to pay you back.

The alternative scenario paints a parasitic picture of only a different hue — if the US government and similars do eventually pay back all their borrowings in recent decades via raised taxes and spending cuts, we are in a situation where ones children have to collect the invoice for the excessive indulgences of today. A falsis principiis proficisci…