Our unpopular prime Minister

Once again popular euphoria has been replaces by popular discontent. Were the pattern not familiar it would seem strange.

In 1997 I welcomed a change of government, and was glad that the Labour party that took power seemed to have shed the some of the innumerate stupidity and thuggish envy that had characterised that party in the past. However I still had reservations, especially about the self righteous moralising of the new leaders, who seemed to get on disturbingly well with Rupert Murdock, and received from various business men sums of money orders of magnitude greater than the puny donations in brown envelopes with which Mr. Al Fayed had persuaded Conservative back-benchers to ask question in the Commons.

I considered Brown discredited by his first budget with it's removal of tax concessions from pension funds.

Even in the light of those considerations, our electorate returned Labour to power with a huge majority in 2001, and again, though with a smaller majority, in 2005, after they had taken us into an unnecessary war on the basis of false intelligence.

Since then, little has changed that may reasonably be attributed to any change on the part of the Government, yet there has been a great change in popular sentiment. The state of the economy does indeed give cause for concern, but insofar as government policies have contributed to those problems, those policies date back to the days of Labour popularity.

The swing in popular sentiment seems to consist partly of people who supported the policies, objecting to their consequences, and partly of people greatly exaggerating the power of the government to control the economy. My first reaction was to feel depressed that I live among such stupid people, but I console myself with the thought that the stupidity of collective decisions may be much greater than that of most of the participating individuals.

During the last three decades the share of the vote won by each of the major parties has varied between about 28% (Labour in 1983) and the mid forties, a variation of about 17%, or about one sixth of those voting, so the ranks of those voting against the results of their own policies may be relatively small. In a way that is just as depressing as my first conclusion, if not more so. Collective folly is particularly irritating because it is hard to anyone in particular to blame, and I like having someone to blame !!!

Other people's governments

I'm very dubious about attempts to reform other governments simply on the grounds that they mismanage their own affairs inside their own borders.

I recall saying something of the sort to a gaggle of self righteous people picketing Sainsbury's because it sold goods from South Africa, though I think the only item of South African origin on sale at that particular branch was tinned pineapple.

When Apartheid came to a largely peaceful end a few years later, I wondered if I'd been wrong in the case of sanctions against South Africa, but as one intervention followed another (Yugoslavia, Iraq) my doubts revived.

It's most interesting that in the recent argument about sanctions against Zimbabwe, even the government of South Africa, an apparent beneficiary of a sanctions campaign in the 1980's, seems to have lost faith in the process and now opposes action against Zimbabwe.

Schools may become prisons.

I notice that a minister called Kevin Brennan has suggested that schoolchildren should be prevented from leaving school during lunch hours lest they buy food thought to be unhealthy.

Critics have argued that such a ban would be unenforceable. I suspect that that would be true in the case of most schools, but that does not mean that imposing the ban would just be harmless folly.

It would damage relationships between teachers and pupils by giving the latter yet another excuse to resent the authority of the former, so that it would be even harder to persuade children to study hard, which is what I thought they were supposed to be doing at school.

Children who managed to smuggle into school those derided snacks high in fat and salt would enjoy them all the more because the enjoyment would be illicit, and combined with a chance to laugh at the ineffectual efforts of those teachers foolish enough to try to enforce the ban.

Who's Who tells me that Brennan taught (Economics and Business Studies) in a school for nine years; unless he is exceptionally unobservant he should know what children are like !

The stupidity of good people

I don't maintain that all good people are stupid, but many of the noisily good appear conspicuously stupid, as they participate in one moral panic after another.

Just now there is a moral panic about Zimbabwe.

I think that many people cannot face the fact that cruelty corruption and misgovernment are universal, and even extreme forms of those ills are very common. It is therefore consoling to concentrate on the affairs of one small ill governed country, to attribute its ills to a very small number of people, and to plan to remove them. The recently favoured scapegoats have been Yugoslavia and Iraq, and now it's Zimbabwe. I offer no excuses for the misrulers of those places, but do deplore concentration on them almost to the exclusion of other news.

It helps people forget the misdeeds of countries that are too powerful to be confronted like China, an autocracy that oppresses about a fifth of the world's population, and the USA that has forced corruption and organised crime on the entire world with its absurd drugs war.

Mathew Parris recently wrote an excellent article about Zimbabwe.

A strange percentage

From time to time reference is made to a report by a number of scientist asserting
that there is:

"a 90 per cent chance that humans were the main cause of climate change"

I'm not at all sure what that means, mainly because I can't imagine any method by which such a figure could be calculated.

In everyday conversation someone might say "90% certain" to indicate moderate, but not complete confidence in the truth of the proposition in question. However, in scientific discourse as opposed to casual chatter one expects a number to be the result of some calculation. The choice of 90 indicates a reason for thinking it is greater than 89 and less than 91.

I assume that the 90% is meant to be a probability, so the claim is equivalent to:

"The probability that humans are the main cause of climate change = 0.9"

I think that such a use of probability is untenable.

In the 1930's and 1940's philosophers of science, including some scientists in their philosophical moments, tried to solve the notorious Problem of Induction by assigning probabilities to hypotheses. After fierce controversy in which Sir Karl Popper was prominent, those attempts are now generally accepted to have failed. I consider the matter in chapter 6 of my Notes on Philosophy.

I feel a general unease about the discussions of climate change.

It is difficult to distinguish change in climate from fluctuations in weather. Such a distinction would require careful statistical analysis, yet much of the discussion is conducted like the evangelical campaign of a millenarian sect, complete with denunciations of any heretics who dare to express any doubt. That is not the behaviour of honest scientists.

On the other hand the theory of climate change is supported by what I like to call double verification. As well as statistical data that seems to point to some degree of change, there is independent evidence of a mechanism which one would expect to produce such a change, namely increases in the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

I wonder how accurately one can predict changes in climate. The weather is chaotic, so it is worth considering the possibility that climate, when it varies, also does so chaotically. However as climate is a sort of average of weather over moderately long period, chaos in weather does not in itself imply chaos in climate.

I believe that something is going on, though I'm not sure precisely what. People would be wise to brace themselves for a shock of some sort, yet to keep an open mind about precisely what form that shock might take.

Double Death ?

I bought some fly spray today and noticed that it claimed to 'kill bugs dead'

How else could it kill them ?

I find it amusing to invent meanings for apparently meaningless collections of words, and found 'killing dead' quite stimulating.

Perhaps it means killing beyond hope of resurrection. Plato thought all living things have 'souls' which can be reborn in bodies attuned to the merit or otherwise of their previous lives. Perhaps mine is a Platonist fly spray that puts an end even to the cycle of death and reincarnation.

A strange urge to share one's misfortunes

I've just seen a report that "A third of gay men who know they are HIV positive are still having unprotected sex"

See this article on the BBC site.

I particularly noted:

"According to the survey, those who knew they were HIV positive were statistically more likely to have unprotected sex than those who did not."

For a moment I imagined patients, overjoyed at the discovery that their disease can be controlled by drugs, crying 'Goody, Goody, now I have plenty of time to infect someone else', but I don't suppose that many are as frank as that, even to themselves.

Much more likely than conscious malice is casual aversion to thought, and especially to precise scientific thought, an aversion defended, if at all by, some piece of ridiculous prattle which the more sententious may refer to as their 'philosophy of life' and which might include phrases such as 'if it's going to happen, it's going to happen and there's nothing you can do about it' or 'science isn't everything; I'm interested in people, not machines and test tubes'

It appears that an unintended consequence of the development of drugs to treat HIV may have been an increase in the rate of new infections.

Miseducation

I was very depressed to see the following in the press recently:

"Children should no longer be taught traditional subjects at school because they are "middle-class" creations, a Government adviser will claim today.

Professor John White, who contributed to a controversial shake-up of the secondary curriculum, believes lessons should instead cover a series of personal skills.

Pupils would no longer study history, geography and science but learn skills such as energy-saving and civic responsibility through projects and themes."

Note the evasive language with obscure or question begging terms like 'middle-class' and 'civic responsibility'

I shall concentrate on the first, which is often used without any indication of its precise meaning or relevance to the subject under discussion.

'Middle-class' is often used as a term of disapproval by people who consider it important to assert that they themselves are 'left wing', and I get the impression that they object to people who try to be honest and polite, to save and generally to order their finances prudently.

In summarising the results of market research, the term 'middle class' tends to be applied to professionals, such as lawyers, doctors, accountants academics, and to the self employed. In that sense of 'middle class' the people concerned include those whose careers are most dependent on extensive education, so that in a sense education must be largely 'middle class'. To disapprove of such people and the education that produces them comes near to disapproving of civilisation itself.

John White's proposals amount to teaching children his opinions while denying them the knowledge on the basis of which they might form their own opinions. A man who appears to disapprove of careful rigorous thought wants to to exclude such thought from education.

Dr. Who sems to have improved

The last instalment let us into the secret only slowly, and I thought the hints of horror adequately fulfilled by the 'piranhas of the air' eating the living flesh down to the skeleton. Conservation of mass is a problem, but I'm prepared to overlook that.

There are still secrets to be revealed. Who are the little girl and her associates and how are they linked to the library?

Will there be complaints that it is too frightening? I hope that if there are they will be disregarded. Any story exciting enough to be worth following is likely to give nervous children nightmares, just as one of the criteria of an effective medicine is that it is labelled unsuitable for children.

Thinking about thermodynamics in Wales

I recently spent two nights in Wales with a friend who collects railways, crematoria and hats.

We didn't find any new hats, but did visit two railways and a crematorium.

We stayed in the Trefeddian Hotel, Aberdovey, a delightful establishment where the amenities included an 'adults only' lounge. We were pampered with strawberries, and of course lots more too, for breakfast, and delicious five course dinners in the evening. If one doesn't finish a bottle of wine, they keep it till the next day, so we ordered both red and white on the first night and finished them off on the second.

On the Talyllyn Railway I had a chat with a friendly fireman while the engine was getting up steam. He told me that all the steam is vented to the outside (extremely inefficient) and when I peeped inside the driver's cab I noticed that the maximum safe pressure was 150 pounds per square inch. That provided food for thought during, because it was the first time I'd seen any figures for a steam engine, and didn't know the conversion factor from pounds per square inch into anything useful

Although the scenery was very pretty, with wooded hills and waterfalls, I should have enjoyed the journey a lot less had I not been busy converting pounds per square inch into pascals - the answer is about 6900, so the engine operated at about a million pascals, or 10 atmospheres.

Once I got home I looked up the vapour pressure of water and discovered that that pressure corresponds to about 180 degrees C, and by making a rough estimates of work done by the expanding steam in the pistons, and the heat put in, I estimated an upper limit of 6% for the efficiency.That makes steam trains seem much less fun.

It is not because I'm an ardent environmentalist, but because I find waste aesthetically unappealing. Even though I can remember how unpleasant railway travel could be when steam was almost universal, I'm not immune to the superficial charm of the surviving steam railways. The technology is very old and yet it works, thus do we condescend to previous generations. Steam engines make a cheery chuff chuff chuff and whistle frequently, and those that survive often potter along through pretty countryside, but using 94% of the fuel to produce the steam and smoke, and only 6% to make the thing move seems an unreasonable preference for the superficial.

The Ham and Cheese Sandwich Theorem

My patient plodding through the definitions and basic theorems needed to get Topology underway has at last been rewarded with substantial result. The formal statement is:

Given three finite volumes, U, V, and W in Cartesian 3-space, there is at least one plane that bisects all three.

The application to the bisection of a ham and cheese sandwich with one cut should be obvious. Note that no assumption is made about the way the ham and the cheese are distributed within the sandwich.

The proof is quite short and fairly easy to understand, though it does depend on the Borsuk-Ulam Theorem, which my book considers too hard to prove except in one special case.

I almost forgot to watch the last episode of Dr. Who. At one time I'd have almost been counting the minutes to the next episode.

It isn't just the loss of suspense between episodes now that most programmes show a self contained story, though that is a factor. What spoils the new series for me is mainly a combination of over hasty development, and an excess of what the producers probably call 'human interest'.

Much of the excitement provided by good science fiction comes from following the solution to a puzzle, and one cannot enjoy the solution to a puzzle unless one is first given a chance to be puzzled by it.

Dr Who's adventures used to start with people notiving that something a little odd was happening. As the Doctor probed into events things appeared odder and odder, eventually revealing the, usually malign, source. But even when the culprits were revealed there was still the further puzzle of why they were doing it and whether they were acting on their own account or as agents of some even more sinister power. One used to be kept on tenterhooks for weeks, but no more, alas.

Something else science fiction can do is to show the universe from an unfamiliar, non-human point of view. I'm not sure how realistic it is for we human beings to try to adopt a point of view that can probably never really be ours, but the attempt can at least be thought provoking. Having Dr. Who falling in love makes it harder to develop such point of view, because our thoughts about love are an elaborate ideology of collective self deception.

Human society with its politics and morality is an elaborate mechanism that serves to increase the number of human beings, a sort of epiphenomenon of the reproductive instinct, what F. A. Hayek (Law Legislation and Liberty) would have called a Spontaneous Order. Insofar as love transcends the primal impulse to mate, it is a sort of megalomaniac desire to have descendants, and society is a compromise between the competing reproductive instincts of different people, hence the strange belief in the sanctity of life.

Because we are human we cannot easily escape from this point of view, and possibly cannot escape at all, but it is refreshing sometimes to contemplate the world as it might appear to one whose vision was not obscured by the ideology of love. It seems a pity to miss an opportunity.