Change

 

Crown of Creation

Life is change
How it differs from the rocks
I've seen their ways too often for my liking
New worlds to gain
My life is too survive
And be alive for you

If life is change, I may have to accept change, but do I have to like it??

I am old enough, and set enough in my ways,  to understand that some changes may be inevitable, but they are not always welcome.  Changes mostly come from the young, and when elders have complained about the young throughout recorded history they may actually be complaining about change.  But there are different aspects of change.  One aspect is the change itself.  The other aspect is the rate of change.

Liberals and conservatives often differ on how change is considered.  Liberals are often perceived to be more open to change, while conservatives resist change.  But this may be the only magnitude of the change.  What is the probability of the change? How much of a change is it?

Also important is the period over which the change is going to happen.  Some changes happen over geological time, like continental drift, while others appear to be instantaneous, like avalanches or landslides.  If the North American plate is getting farther from the Eurasian plate at a rate of 0.25 inches/year, that is an interesting aspect of continental drift. But if one is planning a trip from North America to Europe that will take less than a month, it probably can be ignored.  On the other hand a landslide is also a change, but it happens over a very short period and is not easily ignored.

Complaints about a change, e.g. the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, should be separated from the rapidity of that change.  We might, or might not, have influence on neither the change, nor the period over which that change occurred.  The only difference between evolution and  revolution is that the first is a gradual change and the second is a rapid change.

One of the three dimensions of the proposed framework for human behavior: Rights (User Optimal) versus Duty (System Optimal) also needs to be considered.  A User has a finite lifetime which is typically much, much shorter than the System’s lifetime.  If the change does not happen in the User’s lifetime, but if it does happen in the System’s lifetime, that does not mean that the change does not happen, just that change might not be considered in the User Optimal. Any costs associated with mitigating that change would be resisted by those who only think of their User Optimal solution.

Average vs Mean

 

Average Guy

I ain't no Christian or no born again saint
I ain't no cowboy or Marxist D.A.
I ain't no criminal or Reverend Cripple from the right
I am just your average guy, trying to do what's right

What is the average?

Humans have an innate ability to solve complex mathematics.  That however is not exceptional.  The spiral of sunflower seeds follows a Fibonacci sequence.  A lifeless coastline follows the fractal pattern of a Mandelbrot set.  If plants and lifeless coastlines follow mathematical rules, then maybe humans are not so exceptional.  It may be only the language and symbols of mathematics that are intimating and confusing.

Mathematics uses words that may seem familiar but may have more nuances than the conventional usage.  In mathematics, average means the centrality of the normal.  

Humor is often found in the conflict between what is said and what is meant.  Two jokes illustrate the difference between average in common usage and in mathematics.

A once popular radio show popularized the Lake Wobegon effect, where “all the children are above average”.  The joke being that the average is the centrality of the normal.  If everyone is above average, then that is no longer the centrality and it is time to compute a new average.

Another joke is that a  statistician who has his head in an oven and feet in ice is supposed to say that on average his body temperature is at room temperature, and that is “normal”.  The problem is that what is considered normal to most people, is a Gaussian distribution to a statistician.  This distribution has a centrality of zero AND a variance of 1.  Room temperature is a normal distribution. The variance of having your feet in ice and head in an oven is much greater than  1, the variance of a normal distribution and no statistician would make the statement in the joke.

When people say average, it is often assumed that they intend the mean.  The mean is easier to compute.  It requires the ratio of only two numbers, the total of the observations and the number of the observations.  The median is harder to compute.  It requires identifying the point at which 50% of the observations are above, and 50% of the observations are below. You can calculate the mean from the totals.  You need to sort each observation to compute the median.

A perfect uniform normal distribution has a mean, median, and mode of zero. That is not terribly useful, but if the mean is added to every observation, the coordinate system is translated to a new origin, which is the mean and not zero.  If the median still equals this mean AND the variance is 1, then, and only then, this is a coordinate translation of the “normal” distribution.   If the mean and median are not equal, then the observations are NOT “normal”.

A Gaussian distribution is commonly called “normal” because nature appears to favor this distribution .  People judge themselves against the average, the centrality of the normal. A problem may be that the “normal” is confused with the mean, because the median may be the harder to compute. The mean and median income, or wealth, in the United States are very different.  A statistician would say that is not “normal”. Nature, or humans, might not do all of the computation that a mathematician does, but you only to do those computations to prove that it is normal. Humans, and nature, can apparently do those computations innately to tell if it is normal.

Average is the centrality of a normal distribution.  If the mean and median are very different from each other, then the distribution is not normal. When the distribution is not normal, the average might be the median, and not the mean.

Anonymity

 You Don’t Know Me

You give your hand to me
And then you say "Goodbye"
And I watched you walk away
Beside the lucky guy
Oh, you'll never ever know
The one who loved you so
No, you don't know me

When we ask to be anonymous, how hard is it to know us?

Recently a right-wing Catholic newsletter unmasked a high ranking priest as using the Grindr App, despite its promise to be anonymous.  Can any App promise to be anonymous?

Any App, or site, that tracks your location, as many smartphone Apps do, can never be anonymous.  At best it can mask your identity, but with enough inductive reasoning it is possible to unmask you.

While the app may not record identifying information, your location may be used to unmask your identity.  If there are certain locations that only you can be, and those location are stored, then if a site observes that you are at that location, then you are not anonymous to someone who also knows who can be at that  location.  If your location has been tracked over many days, it may be assumed that between the hours of 2 AM and 6 AM that the location where you are most frequently observed is your home, and that the location on weekdays where you are most frequently observed between Noon and 4 PM is your work.  Tax assessor, employment, voting and any other public information can be combined with this location information to unmask you.  A site can promise to mask you.  It can make peering behind that mask very difficult.  It can’t promise that no one will ever peer behind  that mask.

Sovereignity

 

Her Majesty

I wanna tell her that I love her a lot
But I gotta get a bellyful of wine
Her majesty's a pretty nice girl
Someday I'm going to make her mine, oh, yeah
Someday I'm going to make her mine

Queen Elizabeth is the sovereign of the United Kingdom and several other countries. 
Who is the sovereign of the US?

Queen Elizabeth is the sovereign of the United Kingdom, (and Canada, Australia and several other Commonwealth countries).  All property not owned by individuals, or corporations, is owned by the sovereign.  You don’t have to travel to the United Kingdom to experience this first hand.  You can travel north to Canada where you will travel on the Queen’s Highway or visit the Queen’s Parks.  The ships of the Navy of the United Kingdom have HMS, Her Majesty’s Ship, before the name.  But the sovereign needs a government to administer that sovereignty.  The United Kingdom’s Parliament administers the government on behalf of the Queen .  The United Kingdom is a constitutional monarchy where there is a sovereign, the monarch, but the powers of the sovereign are constrained by a constitution. 

The United States of America is just that, States in America that have chosen to be United.  Before the adoption of the US Constitution, each state was sovereign.  By ratifying the Constitution each state agreed to have as its sovereign, as established in that document, the People.  Thus the People of the United States are the sovereign.  But that does not mean that each person is a co-equal as sovereign.  Think of the United States as a corporation, which owns property. An individual shareholder does not have the right to property of the corporation.  Even though I am a shareholder of Disney, I still pay the entrance fee to use the property at Disneyland.  I understand that have no claim to ownership of Disneyland despite the fact that I own Disney stock.

The head of the executive branch of government, the president, stands in for the sovereign when circumstances require the presence of a person, such as state dinners, weddings, coronations, funerals, etc.  But the fact that the President is standing in for the sovereign in no way makes him the sovereign.  The officers of the United States swear an oath to uphold the Constitution.  As such it is the People’s Supreme Court, not the Justices appointed by the president.  It is the People’s Justice Department, not the President’s Justice Department.  It is the People’s Capitol and those who enter it acting as if they are the sovereign are correct that they are persons and the people are the sovereign, but they do NOT have joint ownership of the Capitol or any other sovereign property.  Just like I expect to be arrested if I trespass on Disney property despite being  a Disney shareholder, if I violate the rules of the sovereign on any public, sovereign, property I should expect to be arrested.  The People are the sovereign, but that does not make each person the sovereign.  The President is not a sovereign, and an election only makes him head of the executive branch of government, but it does not make him a sovereign.

Trust II

 

Trust In Me

Trust in me, baby, give me time, gimme time, um gimme time
I heard somebody say, oh, "The older the grape
Sweeter the wine, sweeter the wine"

Whom should you trust?

The least trustworthy politicians during my lifetime have been Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump. ( with honorable mentions to Newt Gingrich and Henry Kissinger). Yes, I realize that they are all Republicans.  Barry Goldwater dishonestly said that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice!” and “moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!”. Richard Nixon is famously remembered as “Tricky Dick” who resigned as a result of “Watergate”.  Ronald Reagan said that government is the problem and then went on to “prove” this by leading the government that gave us Iran Contra among others.  And Donald Trump?  His misdeeds are too numerous to list.  Newt Gingrich rose to fame speaking on C-SPAN to what on the other, unseen, side of the camera was an empty Congressional chamber.  Henry Kissinger was a proponent of the Realpolitik which proposes that the enemy of my enemy is my fiend, which is a provably false statement. I am not including Warren Harding and others, only because, even though I am 70, they died before I was born.

But Republicans have also given us  Abraham “Honest Abe” Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. Elliot Richardson was  a Republican who opposed Richard Nixon in the Saturday Night Massacre. Gerald Ford and John McCain were exemplary men of integrity.  One of the largest political conflicts in the late 19^th Century was an intra-party fight between traditional Republicans and  Mugwumps, the anti-corruption Republicans .  I include myself among Republicans as well.  While an independent, I was appointed to a political office by a Republican Governor, and I have voted for Massachusetts Republican Governors.  IMO, some Republicans are not worthy of trust, but that does mean that all Republicans are not worthy of trust.  Trust is not a Republican or Democratic characteristic. It is a human characteristic.  However trust is very hard to re-earn once it has been lost. Perhaps our motto should not be “Trust everyone, but always cut the cards", or “Trust everyone, but carry a big stick”, but “Trust everyone, until they lose our trust."

Afghanistan

 

Shelter From the Storm

I've heard newborn babies wailin' like a mournin' dove
And old men with broken teeth stranded without love
Do I understand your question, man, is it hopeless and forlorn
Come in, she said
I'll give ya shelter from the storm

The greatest gift we can offer is to give shelter from the storm.

The images from Afghanistan are tragic, but they are hardly surprising.  Is it any different than a domestic violence situation?  We can provide shelters and support for victims of domestic violence. But those victims need to leave the sovereignty of their home, which they may share with their abuser, and enter spaces over which the rest of society has sovereignty, standing.  If the victim refuses to leave their abusers, welcomes their abuser into their home, there is little that we can do that is proactive.  We can punish domestic violence after it has occurred, but we can only be reactive. Unfortunately we can’t know the future.  We can react to events that have happened, but we can’t react to events that have not yet happened, even if we have an abiding fear that they will happen.

Afghanistan is very similar to a domestic violence situation.  Are women, children and innocents being abused?  Can we stop this abuse? 20 years have told us that in their country, over which we have no sovereignty, we can hope that violence will not occur, we can provide an example, we can provide institutions to try and prevent the worst, but we can only lead that horse to water, we can not make him drink.

What we can do is provide relief from disasters, whether it is physical, natural, economic, etc.  Should we have negotiated with the abusers without the victims and given those abusers status and recognition? If we lie down with dogs won’t we get fleas?  What should our response to those fleeing disasters be?  Should it be, “Stay away, no more room here” or should it be “Come in, I’ll give you shelter from the storm”.

 

Economics II

 

You’re The Man

Don't give us no peace sign
Turn around, rob the people blind
Ah, economics, who is the issue
Do you have a plan with you?
'Cause, if you've got a master plan
(Got the vote for you)
You're the man.

Is economics the key to the master plan?

Economics is often called the dismal science.  This is a reflection that economics often throws cold water, reality, on what we want to do, because we can’t afford it.  This is true of ALL sciences.  Science is about discovering rules on how things actually work, which is often not how we wish they would work.  “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.” 

The three laws of thermodynamics can be humorously,  but dismally, expressed as:

You can’t win.  (energy can not be created or destroyed in an isolated system.)

You can’t break even. (the entropy of any isolated system always increases.)

You can’t quit the game. (the entropy of a system approaches a constant value as the temperature approaches absolute zero.)

Economics is often interpreted as setting a price so that there is a profit.  It actually is much more than that.  It is about setting a price that allocates resources, even when there is no profit.  Hear that Postmaster General DeJoy?  The US Post Office is a government SERVICE that is not supposed to make a profit.  Minimizing a loss is NOT the same as ensuring a profit.  If you want to be the man, learn the rules.