Mental Energy

Everyone knows, in a general way, that thinking is hard work. Our brains can only do so much of this work in a day before they get groggy and stupid. Freud understood this, and called the wearing down of the mind by overwork "ego depletion." In recent decades some psychologists have found ways to measure this effect, and they have shown that doing mental work tires us out and leads to sloppy thinking and poor decisions. The first really convincing experiments involved self control, and they showed that resisting temptation is a grueling mental task that eventually wears out our willpower:

there is a finite store of mental energy for exerting self-control. When people fended off the temptation to scarf down M&M’s or freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies, they were then less able to resist other temptations. When they forced themselves to remain stoic during a tearjerker movie, afterward they gave up more quickly on lab tasks requiring self-discipline, like working on a geometry puzzle or squeezing a hand-grip exerciser. Willpower turned out to be more than a folk concept or a metaphor. It really was a form of mental energy that could be exhausted. The experiments confirmed the 19th-century notion of willpower being like a muscle that was fatigued with use, a force that could be conserved by avoiding temptation.

Now there is good evidence of what is being called "decision fatigue":

No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be, you can’t make decision after decision without paying a biological price. It’s different from ordinary physical fatigue — you’re not consciously aware of being tired — but you’re low on mental energy. The more choices you make throughout the day, the harder each one becomes for your brain, and eventually it looks for shortcuts, usually in either of two very different ways. One shortcut is to become reckless: to act impulsively instead of expending the energy to first think through the consequences. (Sure, tweet that photo! What could go wrong?) The other shortcut is the ultimate energy saver: do nothing. Instead of agonizing over decisions, avoid any choice. Ducking a decision often creates bigger problems in the long run, but for the moment, it eases the mental strain.

So only make important decisions when your mind is fresh. And if there are temptations you need to resist -- donuts, dubious women -- try to stay far away from them instead of relying on your conscience to always be strong for you, because it gets tired, too.

Rebel Victory in Libya?

Big doings in Libya, where Gaddafi's regime is teetering:

By late Sunday, rebel fighters had converged on the capital from four directions, and opposition flags were fluttering over buildings across the city. Thousands of people poured onto the streets in areas under rebel control to celebrate, stomping on posters of Gaddafi, setting off fireworks and honking horns, even in the symbolically significant Green Square in the heart of the city, previously the scene of near-daily pro-Gaddafi rallies.

With communications to the capital sporadic and some journalists confined to their hotel, reports of opposition gains within Tripoli could not be independently confirmed, and some experts cautioned that a tough urban battle may yet lie ahead between the lightly armed and untrained rebels and the elite government forces kept in reserve for the defense of the capital.

But reporters traveling with rebel forces said Gaddafi’s defenses were melting away faster than had been expected, with reports of entire units fleeing as rebels entered the capital from the south, east and west, and his supporters inside the city tearing off their uniforms, throwing down their weapons and attempting to blend into the population.

A Tripoli-based activist said the rebels had secured the seaport, where several hundred reinforcements for the opposition had arrived by boat, and were in the process of evicting Gaddafi loyalists from the Mitiga air base on the eastern edge of the city.

“The Gaddafi regime is clearly crumbling,” said a statement issued by NATO, whose five-month-old aerial bombing campaign, ostensibly launched to protect civilians, contributed enormously to the erosion of government defenses. A U.S. official in Washington who was monitoring the intelligence from Libya said that the situation in Tripoli was fluid but that Gaddafi and his hard-core loyalists did not appear likely to give up easily.

At the moment it appears that this may end without great massacres or years of stalemate, and that would be grand.

Wood Pile

"Wood Pile" by J.C.M. Hayward, 1912. From an exhibit of photographs of Canada's industrial landscape. That is one seriously big pile of logs.

Clara is 6

In Richmond, yesterday, princess for a day.

Ben and his cousin Zoey being a bit rowdy.

And a "reenactment," of what I am not sure.

A modest sub-set of my Richmond relations assembled to mark the birthdays of the five kinfolk born in August.

Clara, Zoey, and Grandma with the cake.

Learning to use her new roller skates.

Pepper Harvest

Poblanos, jalapenos, cherry bombs. Today.

Refugees are Fleeing Tripoli

Hundreds of people slipped out of Tripoli overnight and fled to rebel lines, and the rebels are saying this is another sign that the capital will soon fall to them.

The refugees are part of a growing exodus from the Libyan capital, which follows significant advances by the ragtag rebel army toward the capital. Their victories have led many to expect Gaddafi’s era to be finished in in the coming days or weeks, but many inhabitants of Tripoli say they can’t wait that long.

The refugees leaving the city by car are joining thousands of others who traded Gaddafi-controlled areas for the rebel stronghold of the Nafusa Mountains. Government intimidation, food shortages and fear for NATO bombings have prompted them to leave, they say, stressing that the majority of people in the capital are waiting for the rebels to enter the city.

I am not so sure about this, since Gaddafi's forces seem to have a lot of fight left in them. But perhaps a tipping point has been crossed.

A Roman Leather Bikini

Found in London. It looks like the garments acrobats are wearing in Roman art, but with the Romans you can never tell who might have been wearing leather underwear.

My Economic Prescription

As I have said a few times on this blog, my sense is that the real cause of the recent financial crisis was too much money. There was so much capital sloshing around world markets that investors could not think of anything better to do with it than lend it to people who could not pay it back, like poor American homeowners, Irish builders, and the Greek government. During my vacation I had a long conversation about this with a relation of mine who runs a real estate investment company, a very smart fellow who has made a fortune in the business. He agreed with me that there really was too much money; I think he said, "capital accumulation was too rapid." He said that back in the 1980s it was easy for him to find projects that would return 20 percent on investment, but because so much money has flooded into real estate over the past 25 years, now it is hard to find projects that will return 3 percent. The crazy financial innovations of the past decade were basically a desperate attempt to somehow generate good returns in a world where there were no more good, high-yield investments. So our basic situation right now is that despite the huge losses, there is more capital in world markets than private business can find good uses for.

The situation is very different on the public side. In the US we are suffering from a gigantic shortfall of government investment -- our roads and railroads are falling apart, our airports need work, and so on. A high speed rail network across California, which I think would be a great investment, would cost $50 to $80 billion. No doubt an east coast system would cost even more. All of our subway and elevated train system could use big infusions of money, too. So the obvious thing to do with all that excess capital is to invest it in the public sector.

The main reason economists object to raising taxes on the rich is that this will impede the formation of capital, since rich people save a much higher percentage of their incomes than middle class people do. But at the moment we have, not too little private capital, but too much. So raising taxes on the rich would not create any problems on the capital side.

What I think we should do is to use a few hundred billion of the excess capital floating around to upgrade America's transportation infrastructure. Some of this would be tapped via higher taxes, the rest through bonds -- at times lately the US government has been paying a negative real interest rate on borrowed money. This would put thousands of people to work at good jobs, it would buy us something that will really make Americans better off, and it would soak up some of the excess capital that has been making terrible mischief around the world.

Lady Jane Digby

This is from Edward Rice's biography of Richard Francis Burton, describing the time when Burton was British consul in Damascus, Syria. This was the 1870s. Burton's wife Isabel was with him, and she entertained a wide circle of mainly European guests:

One of the most colorful members of the salon was Lady Jane Digby, "notorious and polyandrous," as Thomas Wright described her. It was true she had married often and always on the highest levels. She was first the wife of Lord Ellenborough, then of Prince Swartenberg, and after that of a number of other gentlemen. Wrights says, six, but he was relying on gossip, and he overlooked the uncounted affairs, which included interludes with several kings, among the King Ludwig I of Bavaria and Ludwig's son, Otto, when he was King of Greece. After the last few relationships in Greece, one with a Count Spyridon Theotoky and another with an Albanian swashbuckler, General Xristodoloous Hadji-Petros, who took her off into the reckless life of the Balkan mountains -- the general was over sixty, Jane in her thirties -- she left Europe and made her way to the Orient, where she married a true Bedawin shaykh. . . . the shaykh, Medjuel El Mezrab, was the leader of an important sub-tribe of nomads. Isabel had to admit that "he was a very intelligent charming man man in any light but that of a husband. That made me shudder." However, it was a marriage that eventually lasted twenty-six years, during which Jane attempted to "tame" her husband -- it took her fifteen years to induce him to use a knife and fork. . . . Both Isabel and Lady Jane were inveterate smokers, and with Abd el Kadir and Burton they spent endless evenings on the terrace of the house with their water pipes.

Isabel Burton described Lady Jane like this:

A most beautiful woman, though sixty-one, tall, commanding, and queen-like. She spoke nine languages perfectly . . . she lived half the year in Damascus, and half with her husband in his Bedawin tents, she like any other Bedawin woman, but honoured and respected as the queen of her tribe, wearing one blue garment, her beautiful hair in two long plaits down to the ground, milking the camels, serving her husband, preparing his food, sitting on the floor and washing his feet, giving him his coffee, and while he ate she stood and waited on him, and glorying in it. She looked splendid in Oriental dress . . . she was my most intimate friend, and she dictated to me the whole of her biography.

Alas, after Lady Jane died, her family insisted that her memoirs be burned, and Isabel did so, a sort of warm up for burning so many of her husband's papers after his death. The portrait was made in 1831, when Lady Jane was 24.

Antietam

I was up in Sharpsburg, Maryland for a project kickoff meeting, and spend some time wandering the Antietam Battlefield. This is one of my favorite battlefields, because you can get such a good sense of the terrain where this confused, bloody battle took place.

Now it is a very beautiful place, studded with well-preserved nineteenth-century farms.

Here's an Interesting Boondoggle

The latest from the deep minds in the Pentagon basement:

In what is perhaps the ultimate startup opportunity, Darpa, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, plans to award some lucky, ambitious and star-struck organization roughly $500,000 in seed money to begin studying what it would take — organizationally, technically, sociologically and ethically — to send humans to another star, a challenge of such magnitude that the study alone could take a hundred years.

The awarding of that grant, on Nov. 11 — 11/11/11 — is planned as the culmination of a yearlong Darpa-NASA effort called the 100-Year Starship Study, which started quietly last winter and will include a three-day public symposium in Orlando, Fla., on Sept. 30 on the whys and wherefores of interstellar travel.

Count me among the skeptics on this one. It seems to me that talking about interstellar missions now is like talking about moon missions in 1910; the basic technological knowhow is not there to seriously plan a mission. If the Interplanetary Society wants to make this their hobby, great, but DARPA really shouldn't be spending government money on this.

Libertarianism is not Like Atheism

Penn Jillette:

What makes me libertarian is what makes me an atheist -- I don't know. If I don't know, I don't believe. I don't know exactly how we got here, and I don't think anyone else does, either. We have some of the pieces of the puzzle and we'll get more, but I'm not going to use faith to fill in the gaps. I'm not going to believe things that TV hosts state without proof. I'll wait for real evidence and then I'll believe.

And I don't think anyone really knows how to help everyone. I don't even know what's best for me. Take my uncertainty about what's best for me and multiply that by every combination of the over 300 million people in the United States and I have no idea what the government should do.

. . . .I'm scared to death of being in debt. I was a street juggler and carny trash -- I couldn't get my debt limit raised, I couldn't even get a debt limit -- my only choice was to live within my means. That's all I understand from my experience, and that's not much.

It's amazing to me how many people think that voting to have the government give poor people money is compassion. Helping poor and suffering people is compassion. Voting for our government to use guns to give money to help poor and suffering people is immoral self-righteous bullying laziness.

People need to be fed, medicated, educated, clothed, and sheltered, and if we're compassionate we'll help them, but you get no moral credit for forcing other people to do what you think is right. There is great joy in helping people, but no joy in doing it at gunpoint.

But libertarianism is nothing like atheism. We have no evidence one way or another about whether there is a god. We have a very large amount of evidence about what it is like to live in various kinds of societies. To be a libertarian is not a sort of non-choice about politics, a confession of ignorance. It is a choice to do and not do certain things. If you ask me, it is more like being a Mormon: it is choosing to join a sect with a very particular outlook on life.

The word missing from Jillette's politics is "we." He does not seem to recognize that people absolutely must live in societies, and therefore must have some means of taking collective action, making rules of behavior, and imposing sanctions on violators. Human life is not possible without the basics of what we call government. There is no meaningful sense in which human life is possible alone.

He wants evidence? Here's mine: name a really nice place to live that doesn't have a powerful government. You can't. Nobody can. Modern nations are in many ways vastly better places to live, for most people, than anything that came before, and they all have powerful governments. Coincidence? I doubt it.

Like most libertarians, Jillette is all caught up in the notion that taxation is coercion, which it is, and therefore that it is immoral, which it is not. I do not believe that freedom is the highest good, and it is certainly not the only good. I wish to live in a society that allows me a large amount of freedom, but I also wish security, public transportation, safe food, and a few million other things that only governments can provide. I willingly sacrifice some of my freedom to get those things. Taxation is not the government forcing people to give up their wealth. It is something all of us decide to do together. And that money you think is "yours" is not; it was created, not by you, but by the large economy and society of which you are a part. It is only by participating in that society that you can achieve any benefit from your labor, and you must therefore -- and reasonably so, it seems to me -- abide by the rules of that society.

I don't know how to help everyone, either, and I am quite certain that some government programs make some people worse off. (Imprisonment for drug use, to take one example.) But nothing is perfect, and we don't need perfect knowledge to see that life in some countries is better than in others. Jillette waxes eloquent on the subject of charity, but this is an experiment we have been running for a few thousand years, and we know that people will not be charitable enough to do the things that governments can do. Several contemporary governments have come very close to eliminating poverty, for example, which I think is a great thing.

For some reason libertarians hate the notion that they could be forced to help someone else. They want to stand on their own, and to help others or watch them starve as they see fit. But this is a dangerous fantasy, born from the habit of thinking that the unit of humanity is the individual person. As I like to say, the technical term for a person living alone is "leopard food." We are social animals, and we can only survive by working together. Once you accept that, you can shed this whole false discourse about freedom vs. coercion and ask the real question: what social arrangements allow people to flourish most fully? To me the evidence is very clear that the answer to this question involves a strong government.

Maine Flowers

When I first went to Maine I was expecting the wonderful scenery, but I was completely unprepared for the flowers. In the cool, rainy weather, things thrive that won't grow in our heat, and at a time when my garden is looking wilted, Maine gardens look spectacular.

The First College Visits

My daughter Mary and I stopped by Bates and Colby Colleges on our way home from Maine today. That's Mary in front of the very impressive Colby Library. She liked both campuses, especially Bates, which is very lovely. More visits tomorrow.

Looking for Some Excitement?

Then maybe this is the job for you:

Nemesis required. 6-month project with possibilty to extend

I've been trying to think of ways to spice up my life. I'm 35 years old, happily married with two kids and I have a good job in insurance. But somethings missing. I feel like I'm old before my time. I need to inject some excitement into my daily routine through my arm before its too late. I need a challenge, something to get the adrenaline pumping again. An addiction would be nice, but, in short, I need a nemesis. I'm willing to pay $350 up front for you services as an arch enemy over the next six months. Nothing crazy. Steal my parking space, knock my coffee over, trip me when Im running to catch the BART and occasionally whisper in my ear, "Ahha, we meet again". That kind of thing. Just keep me on my toes. Complacency will be the death of me. You need to have an evil streak and be blessed with innate guile and cunning. You should also be adept at inconspicuous pursuit. Evil laugh preferred. Send me a photo and a brief explanation why you would be a good nemesis.

British accent preferred.

Hunters Beach

This morning before I started the trip home we took a little walk to Hunters Beach, near the southern tip of Mount Desert Island. It is a delightful stroll through mossy woods, past a lovely stream, down to this rocky beach, with classic Maine scenery. It was raining lightly, enough to fog the pictures but not enough to ruin the morning.

The stream which, as my sister said, is like one Thomas Kincaid would paint.

I love these cobbles, especially the ones made of pink granite.

And then it was the road home for me, hardly enough time to get used to being in Maine, but home and work were calling. I hope next time I get to stay for longer.

Libyan Rebels Advance

Six months into the Civil War, Libyan rebels finally seem to have a military strategy, and to be making some progress with it. Al Jazeera:

Libyan rebels say they now control most of the strategic western town of Az-Zawiyah, as they continue an offensive aimed at isolating Tripoli, the country's capital. . . .

In Az-Zawiyah, rebel commanders said they controlled most of the town, but that they were still taking sniper fire from forces loyal to Muammar Gaddafi. The rebel assault on Az-Zawiyah and its neighbouring towns began on Saturday, as they sought to cut off the southern coastal route from Tunisia which Gaddafi has been using to resupply. Zeina Khodr, Al Jazeera's correspondent in Az-Zawiyah, reported that the rebels had taken control of a bridge along which the highway from Tripoli to Tunisia runs, but that central areas of the city remained contested, with Gaddafi forces employing snipers and mortar fire, as well Grad rockets.

On Sunday, Bashir Ahmed Ali, the rebels' battalion commander in Az-Zawiyah, said that his forces had suffered "many casualties" due to sniper fire. On Monday, rebels said they were focusing on capturing or killing the snipers and clearing out any other pro-government forces left in the town.

The rebels say that they have also taken the towns of Surman, 60km west of Tripoli and Garyan, 50km to the south.

We'll have to see if the rebels hold onto these gains, or do what they usually do and go home to celebrate their victory for a few days, letting Gaddafi's men back in:

The rebels have taken Az-Zawiyah twice before, only to lose it to government counter-offensives.

Meanwhile, Gaddafi's Interior Minister has landed in Cairo with his family, saying it is a "tourist visit. And then this weird item:

A US defence official said Gaddafi's forces had fired a Scud missile for the first time since the uprising, but it landed in the desert and injured no one.

The missile was fired on Sunday morning from a location about 80 km east of Sirte, Gaddafi's home town, and landed east of the coastal oil town of Brega, the official said in Washington, speaking on condition of anonymity.

It was unclear what might have been its target, the official said.

I don't know what that means, but firing Scuds into the desert doesn't strike me as the act of a government that feels in control.

Adam, Eve, and the Genome

Some very conservative, quasi-literalist Christians are questioning the Biblical account of creation, based on the evidence of our genes:

Some conservative scholars are saying publicly that they can no longer believe the Genesis account. Asked how likely it is that we all descended from Adam and Eve, Dennis Venema, a biologist at Trinity Western University, replies: "That would be against all the genomic evidence that we've assembled over the last 20 years, so not likely at all."

Venema says there is no way we can be traced back to a single couple. He says with the mapping of the human genome, it's clear that modern humans emerged from other primates as a large population — long before the Genesis time frame of a few thousand years ago. And given the genetic variation of people today, he says scientists can't get that population size below 10,000 people at any time in our evolutionary history.

To get down to just two ancestors, Venema says, "You would have to postulate that there's been this absolutely astronomical mutation rate that has produced all these new variants in an incredibly short period of time. Those types of mutation rates are just not possible. It would mutate us out of existence."

See, the thing about Darwin's theory is that the more we learn, the better it gets. When he first dreamed up natural selection, nobody knew about genes or mutations or anything about the statistics of evolution. Now we know a lot about those things, and with every new discovery Darwin looks better. You cannot take science seriously and deny evolution; the only way to maintain special creation is to deny validity to science as a way of learning about the world. Accept science in any way, and if you are consistent you end up with evolution. And where does that leave Biblical literalists?

"The evolution controversy today is, I think, a Galileo moment," says Karl Giberson, who authored several books trying to reconcile Christianity and evolution, including The Language of Science and Faith, with Francis Collins.

Giberson — who taught physics at Eastern Nazarene College until his views became too uncomfortable in Christian academia — says Protestants who question Adam and Eve are akin to Galileo in the 1600s, who defied Catholic Church doctrine by stating that the earth revolved around the sun and not vice versa. Galileo was condemned by the church, and it took more than three centuries for the Vatican to express regret at its error.

"When you ignore science, you end up with egg on your face," Giberson says. "The Catholic Church has had an awful lot of egg on its face for centuries because of Galileo. And Protestants would do very well to look at that and to learn from it."

Rick Perry's Nutcase Politics

As I have mentioned, Rick Perry's mouth often gets ahead of his brain, and it is probably silly to think that every crazy thing he has said represents a well-thought out policy he would pursue as president. Nonetheless, he has said many crazy things. Matt Yglesias has a summary of some of the nuttier things in his book of last year, Fed Up:

8. Medicare Is Too Expensive But Must Never Be Cut: Both establishing Medicare in 1965 and expanding it to include prescription drugs in 2003 are examples of “an irresponsible culture of spending in Washington” (page 63), but establishing “‘councils of experts’ and panels of various sorts” to assess the cost effectiveness of different Medicare-eligible treatments is a “frightening” “scheme” that “undermines freedom” and can be fairly labeled “death panels” (page 81).

7. All Bank Regulation Is Unconstitutional: Criticizing the Security and Exchange Commission’s rulemaking process under the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill, Perry asserts that “if the Constitution were shown the appropriate respect, Washington regulation writers wouldn’t have to worry about underrepresented views, because they wouldn’t have control over them in the first place” (page 94).

6. Consumer Financial Protection Is Unconstitutional: Further reiterates his view that all federal financial regulation is illegitimate, listing the SEC on page 44 as part of a “federal alphabet soup” in which “undemocratic unelected Washington bureaucrats” are “now (dubiously) empowered to dictate their own preferences to the American people.”

But by far the best line is this one:

Not only does he argue that the New Deal failed to end the Great Depression, but he asserts “recovery did not come until World War II, when FDR was finally persuaded to unleash private enterprise.” (page 48)

It is difficult to exaggerate the degree of wrongness expressed in this sentence, since the US has never been more socialistic than it was during World War II.

Rocks, Ferns, and Moss

This morning we took the hike up Beech Mountain. My favorite part of this hike is the valley on the far side of the mountain, with its spectacular display of rocks covered with ferns, moss, and lichens. This was a cloudy day, threatening rain, so it was dark in the woods, but these pictures give some sense of what the place is like.

I love the cool lushness of this valley, and the gray strength of the stone.

The paths through these rocks are an invitation to adventure, so I scrambled up over them and found little caves and hidden nooks higher up the slopes.

I love this place, and I could never get tired of exploring these valleys.

Helicopters for Everybody

Once upon a time (1950) the future man got to have both a personal helicopter and a housewife.

Auditorium and Congress Palace Infanta Doña Elena, by Estudio Barozzi Veiga

This new Spanish concert hall has a rather striking form, but I wish it were someplace else. In this location it reminds me of the games I played as a child using plastic dinosaurs and trucks and the like, all of different scales. Instead of seeming like a big building, it looks like a small one in the wrong scale. The giant windows emphasize the effect, which I suppose must be intentional. More pictures here.
Another thing that bothers me is this big, bare, stone pavement; the last thing anybody needs in Spain is more exposure to the sun. Why not a shady arcade?

Why did Japan Surrender?

The standard account of Japan's surrender in August, 1945 is that they did so because of the atomic bomb. Historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa disagrees. He thinks that the key event was Russia's entry into the war. The Japanese leadership had been counting on Stalin to mediate a settlement, perhaps in exchange for territory, but once Russia invaded Japanese-occupied Manchuria they had no option but surrender to the Americans. A summary of Hasegawa's argument:

On Aug. 6, the American bomber Enola Gay dropped its payload on Hiroshima, leaving the signature mushroom cloud and devastation on the ground, including something on the order of 100,000 killed. (The figures remain disputed, and depend on how the fatalities are counted.)

As Hasegawa writes in his book “Racing the Enemy,” the Japanese leadership reacted with concern, but not panic. On Aug. 7, Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo sent an urgent coded telegram to his ambassador in Moscow, asking him to press for a response to the Japanese request for mediation, which the Soviets had yet to provide. The bombing added a “sense of urgency,” Hasegawa says, but the plan remained the same.

Very late the next night, however, something happened that did change the plan. The Soviet Union declared war and launched a broad surprise attack on Japanese forces in Manchuria. In that instant, Japan’s strategy was ruined. Stalin would not be extracting concessions from the Americans. And the approaching Red Army brought new concerns: The military position was more dire, and it was hard to imagine occupying communists allowing Japan’s traditional imperial system to continue. Better to surrender to Washington than to Moscow.

By the morning of Aug. 9, the Japanese Supreme War Council was meeting to discuss the terms of surrender. (During the meeting, the second atomic bomb killed tens of thousands at Nagasaki.) On Aug. 15, the Japanese surrendered unconditionally.

This is very interesting, but I would say that Russia's entry was only the last of a very long series of blows, starting with the destruction of the Japanese navy in 1944. When the emperor confronted his top military commanders to ask them to surrender, he cited two things: the atomic bomb, and his view that Japan was not ready to resist an American invasion.

Obviously this argument has political overtones related to whether the atomic bombing was in any sense justified. Hasegawa himself has publicly said that US bombing attacks on Japanese cities were war crimes. I used to think that, as awful as it was, the bombing of Japanese cities got Japan to surrender before a US invasion that would have been even more terrible. I no longer have that sort of confidence in counterfactuals: perhaps we could have starved Japan into submission with a blockade, coupled with destruction of Japan's railroads, or perhaps the massing of US and Russian invasion forces would have done the job. Who knows? I think the best lesson to take from World War II is that total war is an awful thing, and that we should not ever do it again.

Up Mount Champlain

I took a hike up Mount Champlain this morning. We started early, which I think is crucial here at crowded Acadia. That's the Bowl above, a pond at the foot of the mountain, with Mt. Champlain looming beyond.

And the Bowl from above, on the mountain's shoulder. You can see the fog settling in over the Atlantic.

And looking up toward the summit from the same point.

Tendrils of fog creep up the valleys from the ocean.

I love the cairns that mark the trails in Acadia.

My niece, sister, and brother make their way up the trail.

My niece and siblings at the summit.

And Mary having a celebratory granola bar. This is a little "mountain" just 1048 feet tall (320 m), and not especially steep by Acadia standards. It was still a vigorous hike to the top. These beautiful little mountains are my favorite thing about Mount Desert Island -- you can hike up above the tree line with spectacular views of the ocean and perfect blue lakes, blueberries all around, and get back down in time for lunch.

David Deutsch and What it All Means

Physicist David Deutsch has written a book, The Beginning of Infinity, which I think I will read when it appears in the library, and meanwhile David Albert has a long appreciation in the Times. It seems to be another in that class of books arguing that the discovery of the scientific method was the most important thing in history. Not just human history, mind you, but the history of the universe. In Deutsch's model, we have ceased to live in a world handed to us by nature and started to make our own world; something like Manhattan is more a construction of human intention than natural forces. The development of the universe will come, over time, thanks to our mastery of science, to be more and more about the intentions of humans or other intelligence species and less and less about nature. Albert:

There is a famous collection of arguments from the pioneering days of computer science to the effect that any device able to carry out every one of the entries on a certain relatively short list of elementary logical operations could, in some finite number of steps, calculate the value of any mathematical function that is calculable at all. Devices like that are called “universal computers.” And what interests Deutsch about these arguments is that they imply that there is a certain definite point, a certain definite moment, in the course of acquiring the capacity to perform more and more of the operations on that list, when such a machine will abruptly become as good a calculator as anything, in principle, can be.

Deutsch thinks that such “jumps to universality” must occur not only in the capacity to calculate things, but also in the capacity to understand things, and in the closely related capacity to make things happen. And he thinks that it was precisely such a threshold that was crossed with the invention of the scientific method. There were plenty of things we humans could do, of course, prior to the invention of that method: agriculture, or the domestication of animals, or the design of sundials, or the construction of pyramids. But all of a sudden, with the introduction of that particular habit of concocting and evaluating new hypotheses, there was a sense in which we could do anything. The capacities of a community that has mastered that method to survive, and to learn, and to remake the world according to its inclinations, are (in the long run) literally, mathematically, infinite. And Deutsch is convinced that the tendency of the world to give rise to such communities, more than, say, the force of gravitation, or the second law of thermodynamics, or even the phenomenon of death, is what ultimately gives the world its shape, and what constitutes the genuine essence of nature. “In all cases,” he writes, “the class of transformations that could happen spontaneously — in the absence of knowledge — is negligibly small compared with the class that could be effected artificially by intelligent beings who wanted those transformations to happen. So the explanations of almost all physically possible phenomena are about how knowledge would be applied to bring those phenomena about.” And there is a beautiful and almost mystical irony in all this: that it was precisely by means of the Scientific Revolution, it was precisely by means of accepting that we are not the center of the universe, that we became the center of the universe.

My response boils to, "well, maybe." I think this exaggerates the importance of 17th and 18th century science, since our ability to shape the environment did not start with Newton, but I am willing to accept, for the sake of argument, that this was a crucial step in our growing ability to control the world. Where I really beg to differ is in estimating the importance of this development. I mean this in both past and future senses. Science has had a big impact on the world over the past 250 years, but so have other things, such as ideologies like nationalism and communism, and the development of representative democracy. Many social changes that were enabled by science, such as suburbanization, were by no means made inevitable by it, so even where the contribution of science has been crucial (automobiles, modern warfare) it explains little in itself. Deutsch divides our ideas into those that he likes, because they are true or expand our capabilities, and those that he dislikes, because they are false or sterile. Religion and art fall on the wrong side of this divide. I agree that neither has really made any progress in the past 2000 years, but they have certainly been important. Deutsch probably hopes traditional religions will fade away, but I wouldn't bet on it. There is just a lot more to human life than progress and rationality.

I disagree with Deutsch even more about the future. I am not at all sure that our science is adequate to ever fully understand the universe. Edward Witten and Steven Weinberg, two of our top physicists, have also expressed doubts about our ability to produce a fully complete theory. And even if we do understand the universe fully in theoretical terms, that may only codify our limited ability to change it. The stars are imaginably far away, and if our theories are right, no conceivable technology could make it easy to reach them. I cannot imagine how we would ever go about halting the evolution of our sun, which will eventually make life on our planet's surface impossible.

I expect that scientific progress will continue, and that we will achieve amazing things. But if we are able to reconfigure our genes and give ourselves life expectancies in the thousands of years, I think the result would be boredom, mass despair, and rampant suicide. I do not think we are cut out for lives much longer than the ones we already have. I think, in other words, that we are and will remain subject to limits -- physical, biological, and psychological -- that we will have a very hard time transcending. And while we live out our human lives within those limits, we will keep ourselves going by leaning on those very old pillars of human life: spirituality, art, friendship, love, work, and humor.

In Maine

The view from the porch of my sister's house in Northeast Harbor. We went kayaking today, out to Seal Rock, where we saw so many seals I lost count, sometimes six at once, a few times within 30 feet of the boat.

The flower garden.

Sand dollars from the beach.

Sunset.