Barrel Strength

Some authors make you change how you think about something highly important, such as Darwin on the subject of evolution. Some, like Adam Smith or David Hume, make you change how you think about human nature, and consequently their manner of thinking seeps into all departments of your mind. Nicholas Taleb makes you change how you think about what you know, and thus makes you change your mind more fundamentally than all of them.

You have probably heard of “The Black Swan”, a book by a Lebanese-born New York market trader and philosopher of knowledge named Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Maybe you have not had time to read him yet. Let me help you to make the decision to do so.

A black swan, in Taleb’s definition, is an event which has three characteristics:

• it is an outlier, “as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility.”
• it carries extreme impact;
• despite its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.

Taleb, who is an Orthodox Christian from Lebanon’s elite, is at war with a vast category of higher-order fools, particularly in the area of finance. They are higher-order fools because they are measuring risk by means of intellectual tools that, by their very operation, rule out black swans.

Think of the most dramatic recent example: the attacks on the twin towers on September 11, 2001. I think most of you who witnessed it would have felt like me: this isn’t happening, this can’t be happening, O Lord, we are in a science-fiction universe! (It also illustrates that a black swan to the rest of us is not a black swan to the people who planned it).

Taleb is NOT saying that better predictive abilities will rule out black swans. He is arguing that, in a world far more affected by black swans than we care to believe, it is imperative that our mental tools accommodate their reality. And this, he says, is precisely what business schools and most statistical methods taught in universities fail to do.

The world, he says, is divided into events that come from Mediocristan, and those that come from Extremistan. In Mediocristan, the domain of the Gaussian bell curve of probability, outliers can have very little impact on the statistical norm. Put a hundred people in a line-up and weigh them. Measure their height. Measure their life-spans. Average height, weight and life-span will not depart significantly, that is to say, by orders of magnitude, from some average, even if you compare lard-asses to Laotian hill people, or smokers to alpine hill-dwellers. Even if you compare the average intelligence of 100 people to the average intelligence of Nobel-prize winners.

Then take wealth. Put Bill Gates in a line-up with 100 other people. The combined wealth of the other 99 will hardly be more than Bill Gates’ interest income in a day. Wealth distribution partakes of Extremistan. So does most of the forces and things that make the world as it is.

Taleb is not talking about the kind of risk that occurs inside casinos (the ludic fallacy, he calls it). Nothing that happens inside of a casino partakes of Black Swan-ness, else casinos would go broke as often as Lehman Brothers, Barings, and Wall Street crashes.

Nothing that you know will be the source of a Black Swan. Take for example, the elm tree that hovered over my country house. It started to die, so that progressively larger branches were falling off it. I had it cut down, to avoid the disaster of a 150-year old elm crushing my house. No Black Swan there. The course of events was foreseen and prevented. Most of what you insure against partakes of Mediocristan. Indeed, excluding risks coming from Extremistan is precisely what insurers try to do.

The essence of the Black Swan is that no recurrence of events, no matter for how long, rules out the catastrophe.  Put a few dots in a line.  Put as many dots as you like and make a projection through their mean.  If the dots derive from data subject to the rules of Mediocristan, you may have a valid trend. But if the dots derive from data obeying the mathematics of Extremistan, no matter for how long the data is derived, the trend line is just so much bullshit and self-deception. If a turkey lives a thousand days, it has every reason to believe its kindly feeder will feed it on day 1001. But on day thousand and one, it is killed. For the turkey (but not for us), its slaughter is an event from Extremistan.

Or as he says, you cannot foresee the event, but you can make yourself more robust against the consequences of unforeseen events. Society can stop putting blind people in charge of driving school buses.

Taleb frustrates those who want easy answers because his book asserts that the unpredictable lies in a domain of ignorance so deep that it cannot be computed, ever. It lies beyond the bell curves of Gauss, or even the mathematics of his friend, the late, the regretted Benoit Mandelbrot, whose mathematics inform us that Grey Swans are possible. (Mandelbrot has also written that the stock market obeys rules of risk that are far from those of the bell curve).

He writes:

“I am going to be blunt. Before The Black Swan (and associated papers) most of the epistemology and decision theory was, to an actor in the real world, just sterile mind games and foreplay. Almost all the history of thought is about what we know,or think we know. The Black Swan is the very first attempt (that I know of) in the history of thought to provide a map of where we get hurt by what we don’t know, to set systematic limits to the fragility of knowledge – and to provide exact locations where these maps no longer work.”

I have not conveyed the pleasure of reading Taleb. He is deeply and vastly well-read. He cites thinkers I had never heard of, as well as plenty that I have. He demolishes the reputations of learned fools with elegance and total intellectual clarity. His attacks on economists and finance professors for their systemic blindness to Black Swan phenomena are fierce, joyous, merciless.

“Research shows that academics are overrepresented in the systematizing, Black-Swan-blind category….I haven’t seen any formal direct test of Black Swan foolishness and the systematizing mind, except for a calculation George Martin and I made in 1998, in which we found evidence that all the finance and quantitative economics professors from major universities whom we tracked and who got involved in hedge fund trading ended up making bets against Black Swans, exposing themselves to blow-ups. The best-known such academics were, once again, the “Nobel”-crowned Myron Scholes and Robert C. Merton, whom God created so that I could illustrate my point about Black Swan blindness”.

“Normally, such people exit the gene pool; academic tenure holds them a bit longer.”

Most of all, he confirms you in the conviction that we are living in a Black Swan universe. Why does the stock market crash every eight or ten years on average, rather than the 780  odd years predicted by Gaussian bell curve distributions? Why do small bands of outliers create world-shaking religions? Seize states and plunge us into world wars? Invent devices that destroy previous industrial empires?

Taleb is the foe of the tidy-minded. He is the enemy of hubris. Reading his book will change how you think. It will compactify everything you know into a small quadrant, everything you might know into another, and keep your mind open to the need to fortify yourself against the consequences of things going badly wrong. A large amount of  debt , for example, is not a Black Swan except to the turkeys who hold it.

Ages ago, in another universe, I read a beautiful illustration of what Taleb was talking about in, of all places, Carlos Castaneda. You may recall from your distant hippie past that Carlos Castaneda claimed to have been under the personal tutelage of a Mexican Indian shaman, who was called Don Juan Matus. Castaneda’s teachings are to Don Juan as Plato was to Socrates; he writes as the foolish scribe who never understood what the Master was talking about. 

Don Juan insisted upon the division of the world into the tonal, and the nagual, which we would pronounce “nahual”. The tonal is the domain of the known and the knowable, and the nagual, the unknowable. One day, stirred by his students’ incessant questioning on this point, Don Juan organizes his apprentices to go on a picnic. They gather everything for this journey: plates, cutlery, baskets, even chairs and table. They drive for hours and then begin a hike up into the beautiful arid mountains of the Sierra Nevada, through the chapparal. They climb for hours and eventually find themselves on a flat look-out facing another, equally beautiful range of parallel mountains many miles away across the plain. The range is lit by the rosy afternoon glow of the sun. The view is magnificent: the space, the sky, the silence, the distant eagles, the clouds beginning to be lit from underneath by the setting sun. The table is set, as if it were at a banquet, knives forks and spoons in order, the tablecloth below, the chairs arranged. The scene is perfect in every way.

Then Don Juan says: “You have asked me about the tonal and the nagual: the known, the unknown and the unknowable. This, he says, pointing to the nicely arranged table, is the tonal, the domain of the known. And underneath the table is also the tonal, the domain of the unknown. And this, he says, with a gesture embracing all that surrounds them, the sky, mountains, the earth: this is the nagual.”

We owe to Nassim Taleb the first mathematical and philosophic discussion of the limits of the tonal , the knowable,  in the western tradition. For that we can be grateful. His book is a deeply personal  pleasure. Read it for that reason, if for no other. And do not be distracted by my likening its lesson to an anecdote in Castaneda. Taleb has produced a serious, learned, and delightful mind-changer. He dwells in the world of finance, and has brought deep learning to the problem of risk (the known unknowns) and uncertainty (the unknown unknowns). Mainly, he would say, it is the consequences of the latter which we need to fortify against, and we cannot do this until we acknowledge that this domain is powerful and ever-present.

The big debate that grew up in the 1920s and continues to this day is whether we are permitted to speak of a reality beyond what is picked up by our instruments,  or whether we are confined to speak only of observations through instruments. The principal protagonist of the new way of seeing things was Niels Bohr, the Danish physicist, and in his camp were most of the leading physicists of his day, including Werner Heisenberg (of the uncertainty principle) and Wolfgang Pauli (author of the phrase “not even wrong!”). Ranged against them was the great Einstein himself who, for reasons of his own philosophical/religious preference, was unable to accept that quantum physics was a complete description of reality. Right as far as it goes, but incomplete.

The chief point of what came to be called the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics was the role of the observer in formulating the experiement. Set up the experiment one way, and you see a particle, set up another experiment another way, and the same “particle” appears as a wave.

That the mind of the designer of the experiment should influence the outcome this way is intolerable to many who think about it. Einstein was the first and most important of physicists to reject the Copenhagen intepretation as incomplete (not incorrect, just not the complete description of reality) on the basis of a philosophical preference for realism.

In the years since the Einstein-Bohr debate, the general view has been that the Copenhagen interpretation has been successful. The experiments conducted to prove or disprove Bell’s inequality theorem have shown results consistent with the ideas inherent in the Copenhagen interpretation.

But here’s the problem, for some. You may recall Schrodinger’s cat, the creature who lies dead in the box simultaneously with being alive in the box. Schrodinger used his cat as a thought experiment to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that, until the obervation is made, the probability of it being alive or dead is not determined. Its probability of being either alive or dead”collapses” into a definite observation when the observation is made, and not before. In physics they call this act of observation “collapsing the wave function”.

Physics gained something enormous with quantum theory, but it placed a new god (or God) at the centre by enthroning the act of observation. It dumped materialism – the doctrine that there is only matter and its motions -over the edge of the universe into oblivion. Now mind is at the core of physics. Observation is inextricably linked to the interplay of “material” particles. Observation is the characteritic of mind. Mind therefore enters as a fundamental constiuent of the material universe.

[As a brief aside, it is evident that the biological theorists have yet to come to grips with the philosophical implications of quantum physics. Dawkins take note.]

Once you dump materialism over the edge, you face a certain problem: God.

Quoting from Manjit Kumar’s “Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great debate about the nature of Reality”,

“The Copenhagen interpretation requires an observer outside of the universe to observe it, but since there is none – leaving God aside – the universe should never come into existence but remain forever a superposition of many possibilities”.

Since the world has come into being, the only way to get around the supercosmic observer summoning it forth (as in “I’ll see you to the door”) is to take refuge in the many worlds interpretation of Hugh Everett., published in 1957.

Every time there is a different observation, the universe keeps splitting into one where Schrodinger’s cat lives and another where it dies. It seems absurd at first that one should take refuge in many worlds rather than accept a deity who observes the universe into being, until you think about what the Copenhagen interpretation really does to liberate the universe from the primacy of matter. Once matter no longer matters, so to speak, what limit is there in principle on the generation of as many worlds as observers may contrive with thought alone?

Nothing new is being said here by Sibley; what matters is that for the first time, in a major Canadian newspaper, the house intellectual is giving us some straight talk about the sources of the Islamic crisis in the suppression of reason centuries ago. He is also suggesting, for those with eyes to see, that Muslims cannot adapt to the liberal political order.

“Islamism is grounded in a spiritual pathology based upon a theological deformation that has produced a dysfunctional culture,” argues political scientist Robert Reilly in a newly published book, The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis. Mainstream Sunni Islam, which comprises the majority of the faithful in the Muslim world, “has shut the door to reality in a profound way.” This, says Reilly, is the consequence of Islam’s long suppression of reason in favour of religious dogmatism.

Reilly refers to the abandonment of scientific thinking as the “Dehellenization” of Islam. Islam was eventually dominated by those who thought like al-Ghazali. They held that the Koran contained Allah’s direct speech. And, because Allah’s will and action is unlimited, the Koran, as his eternal word, must apply to all times and places. There is no need to look elsewhere in responding to the human condition, regardless of changing circumstances. Since Allah is the first cause of everything, there is no need to look for secondary causes; that is to say, no need to use reason to understand nature’s laws, and, therefore, no need for science.

Reason and revelation must exist is balance. The crisis of Islam is rooted on the suppression of reason itself, which is one of the two pillars of the balanced life. The crisis of western liberal society, as I read it, lies in the suppression and deligitimization of revelation as the other  source of life-ordering power.

Having spoken enough to militantly anti-Christian leftists, I am persuaded that the current crisis of confidence in western societies is directly rooted on the suppression of revelation. Otherwise they would not need speech codes and “human rights: commissions to police the social order. Between the Muslims and the anti-Christian left, we have nothing to choose. They are both spiritual pathologies.

A new study reveals that Neanderthals cooked and ate vegetables.

In a recent article Roger Penrose describes how the analysis of this cosmic microwave background showed echoes of previous Big Bang-like events.

Collisions between black holes produce spherical ripples in the fabric of spacetime, in the form of gravitational waves. In the Penrose model of reality these ripples are not abolished by a new Big Bang. Images of black-hole collisions that happened before the new Bang may thus imprint themselves as concentric circular marks in the emerging cosmic microwave background…

The actual search for such cosmic circles has been carried out by Vahe Gurzadyan of the Yerevan Physics Institute in Armenia…. His verdict, arrived at after he scoured over 10,000 points on the microwave maps, is that Dr Penrose’s concentric circles are real.

These results suggest that this is not the first iteration of the universe and that Big Bang was preceded by one or more Big Bang.  The implications of this are profound.

Russian astronomer Nikolai Kardashev described three types of civilizations as follows.

• Type I – a civilization that is able to harness all of the power available on a single planet
• Type II – a civilization that is able to harness all of the power available from a single star
• Type III – a civilization that is able to harness all of the power available from a single galaxy

Since then this concept has been extended up to Type VII civilization.  A Type VI civilization can accomplish the following:

Energy control over multiple universes, a power level that is technically infinite.  The civilization may have gained the ability to alter physical laws across multiple universes  These civilizations can escape a dying universe, and thereby become eternal, it is possible that less advanced civilizations can do so as well.

Therefore a Type VI civilization should be able to escape a Big Bang event.   If a Type VI civilization existed in the previous iteration of the universe, then we should be able to contact them in this iteration of the Big Bang because, as Penrose suggests, this is not the first iteration of Big Bang.  They would have taken the last 13.3 billion years, when the current Big Bang occurred, to spread out across the universe.  The fact that there is no sign of alien life so far, implies that either, no civilization in the last iteration of the universe was able to achieve Type VI status or it is not possible to escape a dying universe, i.e. one can never become truly immortal and eternal.  So which is it? More likely the latter – there is no escape.

RFID reader make it all too easy.

http://www.wreg.com/videobeta/?watchId=8ba6f8fc-90a2-4711-90ea-1884ec348310

Hans Rosling, the Swedish demographer is bringing a new understanding to the world of where we are as a species: economically, demographically, socially. Try any one of his speeches and demonstrations on YouTube. You will never use words like “the Third World” or “the developing world” in good conscience again. Our view of the world is obsolete because, unless we have travelled broadly, we still think as we were taught back in the fifties, sixties, or seventies when we went to school, namely that terms like the “Third World” — you know, large families, short lives and poverty — actually represent a reality. Let me say it plainly: the term is a large piece of wallboard which hides reality. Peruse Mr. Rosling’s brilliant work and be changed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLLD1P0cYIA&feature=related

An excellent review of the ideas of the mathemticians and physicists Cantor, Boltzmann, Godel and Turing of the late 19th and early 20th centuries whose worke undermined the billiard-ball universe of Newton, Descartes and Leibniz. We are still undergoing the effects. Follow the YouTube links for further episodes.

I do not know why the author of the series seems to assume that indeterminacy and the impossibility of a coherent mathematical model of reality leads to, or is accompanied by, the death of God. Just think of the Tower of Babble, and you will know that the grand schemes of humans are a very old story, and God is laughing still. But that aside, it is a fine series.

And Turing is right, as is Penrose who follows him: our minds encompass propositions that cannot be deduced from previous logical systems. We are not computers, to state the obvious.

And why people want to conflate belief with certainty is a mystery. A belief is an interpretation, not a certainty. If  I believe it, I do not know it. And If I know it, I do not believe it. So when people talk of “believing” in God they are using the right word. If saints know God they surely have surpassed any need for belief.

A study shows that they do, and seeks to explain it in evolutionary terms.

Please note:

It is important to note that both income and education, as well as childhood social class and parents’ education, are controlled in multiple regression analyses of these data from the US and the UK.  It means that it is not because more intelligent people occupy higher-paying, more important jobs that require them to socialize and drink with their business associates that they drink more alcohol.  It appears to be their intelligence itself, rather than correlates of intelligence, that inclines them to drink more.

Arran Gold, Oban, Dalwhinnie, Rebel Yell, Duggan’s Dew, Tobermory, Blair Atholl, and Glendronach wish to state that they had nothing to do with the sponsorship of this study. Honest!

I like old James Lovelock, all 90 years of him. The founder of Gaia theory has been waging a lonely battle to win acceptance for what to most of us seems obvious, when you allow yourself to think about it. The Gaia theory says that the planet is a living system. Life on earth – the community of living organisms – does its best to maintain an equilibrium.

Take the atmosphere as an example. Gaia theory argues that life maintains oxygen in a dynamic process at 21% by volume of the atmosphere . Add even 1% more oxygen and fires might start too easily. Or consider methane, which is maintained at 1.5 parts per million over the last  million of years. Yet methane oxidizes so that 67% of it disappears every ten years. For methane to be kept so exactly constant, as ice core samples show, argues for processes which work towards an exquisite equilibrium. Life is doing something to maintain conditions suitable for life: that is the nub of Gaia theory.

Locvelock has many opponents.

• To the geologists the Gaia hypothesis is superfluous. The processes of geochemistry are sufficient to explain the equlibria.
• To the computer modelling crowd, the ones one foist anthropogenic global warming on us, Lovelock does not use computers and relies on actual physical measurements. This is way too empirical for their tastes.
• Gaia theory is all too purposeful for Dawkins and the othodox Darwinists, in that the randomness of the mutations is somehow threatened if the mutations work towards overall purposes, such as planetary stability.

So why do I like Lovelock? I like him for the same reason I like George Orwell. They both share a belief the prevailing error of their ages. In Orwell’s case, it was a belief that the market was finished and that a planned society was both better and historically inevitable. In Lovelock’s case it is eco-doomism of a certain plausible kind.  Their errors have had a paradoxical result. By allowing them to share the prevailing errors of their respective political epochs, each has been granted access into the intellectual  and social milieux of a variety of phonies, poseurs, and fanatics. If they had not shared those assumptions, at least in part, they would have stood aside from the main currents of their ages, such as Friedrich Hayek or Bjorn Lomborg, and have found themselves arguing from the outside inward. But by sharing just enough of the prevailing assumptions of their times, they have been allowed entry into worlds where you and I would be barred.

Thus it was Orwell the man of the left who skewered the idea of socialist revolution in Animal Farm, and who depicted the inner feeling of totalitarianism  in 1984. If he had not shared enough of the assumptions of the Left to get close to them, indeed to go fight the fascists in Spain, he would never have seen the Soviets executing the anarchist POUM militia in the Spanish civil war. He would never have shared enough of the socialist ideal to take seriously the betrayal of that ideal by Stalin and his regime. To a capitalist free trade liberal (hence conservative)  such as myself, the fact that socialists are envious little swine , and that communists are trying with all their might to become  social insects and to force you to join this experiment, so that you no longer think but just obey scent glands or something, is merely an observed fact.

So it was in that spirit that I at first perused and then devoured Lovelock’s  “The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning”. The more I read the more I wanted to have the fellow over for a drink.

• he has no use for “greens”; he thinks they vastly underestimate the problem of global warming;
• he has no use for the computer modellers; they fail to make observations of fact and can predict nothing;
• he thinks capitalism will adapt to green ideology by promoting vastly wasteful and stupid windmills and other green energy systems;
• He praises Nigel Lawson, the former British finance minister,  and his other geochemist scientific critics;
• He thinks it is folly for Britain not to rely extensively on the safe  energy of nuclear reactors;
• Most reasearch into the chemical dangers of this or that are spurious; our instruments are so sensitive that they can measure concentrations millions of times lower than that which can cause damage;
• The IPCC has failed to account even for the current climate, let alone the future one;
• the basis of his belief that global warming is happening is that sea levels are rising. All the atmospheric science is basically piffle, in his view.

“The sea level rises for two reasons only: from ice on land that melts and from the expansion of the ocean as it warms”. He has a chart at page 27 showing that the sea level has risen 8 centimeters from 1970 to 2007.

There are many rasons why a skpetic of man-caused global warming would want to read Lovelock. He is fair. He is honest. He has been proven right about many things. He thinks broadly, writes well, and though he may be wrong, he is possibly quite right. As regards the Gaia hypothesis, I suspect it will thrive long after Dawkin’s selfish gene metaphor has been consigned to the pile of reductionist twaddle. Regardless, Lovelock reveals himself the kind of person you would want over for a bottle of wine and maybe  to share a steak. The conversation would be frank, fascinating, and erudite, and he would be open to contrary thinking.

It has not taken long for the editorialists to put their fingers on the button: are the Tories suppressing the long form census for purely ideological reasons? And I ask: what ideology? Or is this just know-nothingism?

The reason why this issue has resonated is that it goes to the issue which all sensible people must ask about any government. Do these people actually care to make fact-based policy? Or worse, are the Conservatives “ideological” in the same way that the NDP are ideological?  My feelings trump your facts: the kind of rubbish we conservatives hear so often on global warming, or any other leftward hot-button issue. Or as the Citizen editorial bewails  today, “the increasingly anti-intellectual and anti-science orientation of the government.”

The data derived from the long form census is the basis of most government policy at municipal, provincial and federal levels, as well as private and public sector investment decisions.

The arguments of the know-nothings tend to be that a) privacy is invaded and b) that, by inference, by depriving governments of data they will somehow make better (more conservative) decisions.

The privacy invasion argument is rubbish, for two reasons. First, because Stats Can shares no personal information whatever with other departments, and has never been faulted for improper revelation of personal matters. As the former head statistician  Ivan Fellegi said on the radio, StatsCan is “obsessed” with the security of its data. The agency  is bound by law not to reveal it. Second, because compared to the data that all financial institutions are required to submit to the Department of Finance in relation to any “suspicious” transactions, the data collected in the long-form, such knowing how long it takes you to commute or how many bathrooms the average person has, is utterly without adverse effect on the citizen. The Privacy Commissioner reported three complaints in relation to the long-form census in the past decade. So if all the know-nothings were really concerned about privacy, they have exercised highly selective indignation.

No one has been bold enough actually to state that governments would somehow make better (that is, more conservative) decisions if it were deprived of accurate data. Yet that is the inference one must draw from the arguments the true believers are making. I am unable to elaborate this argument more fully; it cannot be done.  Not knowing what effects your policies are having  will not make those policies go away or cause them to be cheaper to deliver. Not knowing where and to whom services are to be denied or delivered will not increase efficiency.

Take a case dear to conservative hearts: reducing inappropriate immigration. Immigrants are continually doing less well with the passage of time. Their rates of assimilation  and finding jobs have worsened  overall as we change the composition of the immigrant populations away from Europeans. It is evident that, as we increase  immigration from non-European countries, the cultural transitions are harder for many immigrants to make. Mix in Islam and you can foresee massive social problems building up for the future. Does it profit us not to know exactly how badly or well new waves of Third World immigration are doing? I thought so.

The sad truth of the matter is that the know-nothings are as wrong about this issue as the global warming fanatics are about their pet obsession. They share the same tendency to believe something a priori (we are doing something terrible to the planet; all government is excessive) and to marshall the facts to suit the false premise.

They are missing the point that science – real knowledge- is the basis of material and intellectual progress. Knowledge, grounded in accuracy, assisted by diligence, and aided by perseverance, will finally overcome all obstacles, raise ignorance from despair, and produce happiness in the paths of science.

In turning away from science-based policy, the Conservative government is betraying reason, and demonstrating to a skeptical middle ground of Canadians that they should not be trusted with a majority. So to answer my colleague Duggan’s Dew, the statistics issue is vital to the march towards a Conservative majority. And they – we – are providing a stumbling block to that outcome.

Stephen Harper: this is your issue. Do something intelligent.

The White House  tosses NASA administrator Charles Bolden under the bus and flees from his presidentially-assigned  “outreach to Muslim nations” mission so fast, they’re red-shifting:

American diplomats concerned they’re being replaced by NASA employees, breathe easy: The Space agency and its administrator, Charles Bolden, are not responsible for reaching out to the Muslim world after all.

[...]

… White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Monday, “That was not his task, and that’s not the task of NASA.”

Having taken only one week to achieve, this reversal may be the fastest Obama initiative yet.

President Obama orders NASA to help make Muslims happier about their decline in the sciences:

In a far-reaching restatement of goals for the nation’s space agency, NASA administrator Charles Bolden says President Obama has ordered him to pursue three new objectives: to “re-inspire children” to study science and math, to “expand our international relationships,” and to “reach out to the Muslim world.”  Of those three goals, Bolden said in a recent interview with al-Jazeera, the mission to reach out to Muslims is “perhaps foremost,” because it will help Islamic nations “feel good” about their scientific accomplishments.

[...]

“NASA is not only a space exploration agency,” Bolden concluded, “but also an earth improvement agency.”

And so America itself declines from space pioneer to global psychotherapist.

I ask you, who will rid us of this meddlesome priest-king?!

UPDATE

Behold the contrast, a real American President who speaks to the genuine hopes and pride of his nation:

And Dr. Charles Krauthammer hits smartly for six in his rebuke:

Daniel Suarez’ “Daemon” marks a cunning sci-fi police procedural which turns into, simultaneously, a thrilling page-turner and a profound critique of capitalist society in its current computer-dependent state. What if I could get across an important techno-political treatise in the guise of a thriller? What if I could get across a chapter in Philip Bobbitt’s The Shield of Achilles, or Machiavelli’s The Prince, both of which are brilliant essays on of western warfare and political evolution, as a high-tech police procedural? What if Hobbes wrote Leviathan not as learned discourse on the nature of the state in Renaissance Europe, but as a high-tech science fiction thriller?

Several important writers have tried to tell us that the modern state is finished. But what do we mean by the word “state”? Bobbitt told us that the nation-state was passing into the market-state, which is where we are now. Basically this transition from nation-state to market-state signifies the withdrawal of the state from attempting to equalize outcomes, to one which tries to maximize your opportunities. Bobitt writes brilliantly. I recommend him. Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age also dealt with the nature of the world where nanotechnology has destroyed the basis of the nation-state, and I recommend him, too.

But Suarez is at an entirely more effective level of discourse because you are going to find him in the front of the airport book store before you get on your plane. You are going to be absorbed by the detective story that constitutes the beginning of the novel, and you are going to be increasingly impressed by how good it gets: how much more complex the implications, and how very cleverly he conveys his ideas about the obsolescence of our current governmental-economic structures. Why are they obsolescent? Because the uniformity of the machine-level at which all data is stored, configured, and manipulated has left us essentially as vulnerable as a wheat monoculture to rust, or a potato monoculture to blight.

The blight in question is the “daemon”. The genius inventor of multi-player immersive computer games, Mathew Sobol, has died, and his death causes a number of events to spring forth.  Essentially the daemon, a sophisticated program, takes over the IT departments of many large corporations as a parasite, and threatens the total evaporation of their records unless they comply with Mathew Sobol’s requirements. Sobol speaks through videos recorded before his death. He (in the form of computer-generated videos) asserts that he is the first man fully to realize the implications of computer insecurity and to exploit them in a comprehensive way. His daemon has become a parasite upon computer-dependent civilization, just as it was designed to be.

Don’t be put off by my praise: this is a fascinating book. Daniel Suarez has written something worth your attention.

British Information Commissioner forces the hand-over of tree-ring data to “arch-skeptic”, and part time climate analyst, Doug Keenan. Professor Mike Baillie claims the decision is a “staggering injustice”.

The article concludes:

Keenan, who admits he has no expertise in tree-ring analysis, says that whatever the data may or may not reveal, the university has no right to keep the data secret. The deputy information commissioner agrees.

The finding, combined with Smith’s earlier strictures against the University of East Anglia, could have widespread repercussions for academic research. Baillie calls the ruling “a direct, and unpleasant, off-shoot of the information revolution. It now appears that research data can be demanded, and indeed obtained, by anyone.”

Keenan, meanwhile, has upped the ante. Following the ruling, he this week asked the university to supply emails between Baillie and the head of the university’s centre for climate, environment and chronology, Paula Reimer over the past three years. He told the Guardian they could reveal a conspiracy to prevent him getting Baillie’s data. “The university has obviously not understood how things changed in the wake of climategate,” he said. “They still think they can act with impunity.”