Archive for the ‘quanta’ Category
Mitt Romney, Quantum Politician
Filed under: quanta | Tags: Mitt Romney, politics, quantum physics
Leave a Comment Today’s New York Times opinion section has a great column titled “A Quantum Theory of Mitt Romney.” Drawing on the recent comparison of Romney’s campaign strategies to an Etch-A-Sketch, David Javerbaum observes:
The imagery may have been unfortunate, but Mr. Fehrnstrom’s impulse to analogize is understandable. Metaphors like these, inexact as they are, are the only way the layman can begin to grasp the strange phantom world that underpins the very fabric of not only the Romney campaign but also of Mitt Romney in general. For we have entered the age of quantum politics; and Mitt Romney is the first quantum politician.
With tongue firmly planted in cheek he suggests:
…close and repeated study of his campaign in real-world situations has yielded a standard model that has proved eerily accurate in predicting Mitt Romney’s behavior in debate after debate, speech after speech, awkward look-at-me-I’m-a-regular-guy moment after awkward look-at-me-I’m-a-regular-guy moment, and every other event in his face-time continuum.
The rest of the piece borrows various principles from quantum physics, such as complementarity, probability, uncertainty and even a variation of the many worlds theory.
Ironically, while it appears to have been written in jest it actually does seem to offer a way to understand some of the quirks of Romney and his campaign.
Now that’s just weird!
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100 Seconds on Why Everything Is Connected to Everything Else
Filed under: holism, interconnected, quanta | Tags: Brian Cox, entanglement, Pauli Exclusion Principle, quantum physics, spooky action at a distance
Leave a Comment Brain Pickings has an intriguing post with a video titled “Why Everything is Connected to Everything Else, Explained in 100 Seconds.” The speaker is “rockstar physicist” Brian Cox.
While the clip was intriguing, I’ll admit I was a bit skeptical at first. You can hear some pretty bizarre claims related to quantum physics; I feel some people can get carried away with the quantum mystical stuff. I wondered at first if this was one of those cases. (How seriously should we take a “rockstar physicist”?) But apparently Cox has some serious credentials.
As for what he’s talking about with the Pauli Exclusion Principle, I guess I’ll have to take his word for it. Reading about it here it sounds like the rule is “no two electrons in an atom can be identical.” I didn’t see anything saying that no two atoms in the universe could be identical. Then again, it’s all pretty technical – and I’m no physicist.
His talk reminded me a little of entanglement – which even Einstein thought was so weird that he called it “spooky action at a distance.” I don’t know if there’s a tie-in, but entanglement really does demonstrate a mysterious form of non-local connectedness.
Interesting stuff, this quantum physics…
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Bottom-up in Rio
Filed under: emergent, quanta | Tags: Brazil, change, empowerment, poverty, Rio, technology
Leave a Comment With events like the Arab Spring and OccupyWallStreet, it has almost become a cliche to talk about the empowering potential of technology. Such events have emerged largely thanks to our interconnected technology – most notably things like Facebook and Twitter.
The PBS NewsHour recently offered a segment about technology’s potential in Rio de Janeiro. There social entrepreneur Rodrigo Baggio has created the Center for the Democratization of Information Technology (CDI), which is focused on developing computer literacy and infrastructure in the slums of Rio. As Baggio says (through a translator):
Technology and technological inclusion allows for an impact that’s greater than just learning how to use a computer and being able to have access to the Internet. The big impact is that it empowers low-income communities because it teaches them to utilize technology to understand their reality in a better way and identify the challenges that they face.
He then discusses an example:
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Baggio’s favorite example is this video posted on YouTube by a group of young people.
RODRIGO BAGGIO (through translator): These kids went out with cell phones and digital cameras and they were interviewing community members and taking pictures in order to better understand their reality, the challenges that they face in the community. They chose an example of a photo of rats. One of the kids had taken a photo of rats.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: They traced the rat problem to garbage not properly disposed of or collected. Then they spread word through handmade and computer-generated fliers. They sent this video to the mayor, posted it on YouTube, and Baggio says all the publicity got a response from city hall that resulted in better trash services.
RODRIGO BAGGIO (through translator): I mean, this is a story, you know, 10 kids from a class that used technology, use the Internet to discover a problem, and find a solution for it and change their reality as a result.
This is a great example of the empowering potential of today’s technology; it shows how a social action can emerge using only computers, cell phones, the internet…and a little creativity.
There are those who view power as a top-down phenomena; they argue that the way to improve things is to cater to the rich and powerful and then count on the benefits to “trickle down.” As this case illustrates, those familiar with the power of technology and social media are likely to respond that such views are increasingly out of date in today’s world.
Self-reliance
Filed under: dual nature, interconnected, quanta | Tags: failure, Herman Cain, individualism, internet, linked world, reality, self-reliance, success, the rich, Wall St
Leave a Comment There’s a lot of talk these days about self-reliance. According to some, our lot in life – our success or failure – is all up to us. As GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain recently said:
“Don’t blame Wall Street, don’t blame the big banks, if you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself. It is not someone’s fault if they succeeded, it is someone’s fault if they failed.”
According to psychologist and social scientist Dacher Keltner, Cain’s perception of self-reliance is common among the rich. As MSNBC’s Brian Alexander reports:
…rich people are more likely to think about themselves. “They think that economic success and political outcomes, and personal outcomes, have to do with individual behavior, a good work ethic,” said Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley.
Because the rich gloss over the ways family connections, money and education helped, they come to denigrate the role of government and vigorously oppose taxes to fund it.
This focus on self-reliance can be found among the non-rich as well:
…a strong allegiance to the American Dream can lead even regular folks to overestimate their own self-reliance in the same way as rich people.
As behavioral economist Mark Wilhelm of Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis pointed out, most people could quickly tell you how much they paid in taxes last year but few could put a dollar amount on how they benefited from government by, say, driving on interstate highways, taking drugs gleaned from federally funded medical research, or using inventions created by people educated in public schools.
However, focusing solely on individual self-reliance ignores the reality of our dual particle/wave nature. None of us exists in a vacuum; we are all dependent on people and forces outside of us. As Albert Einstein once said:
A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of others.
Our focus on self-reliance can even blind us about our selves. Ernest Becker, in his Pulitzer-winning book The Denial of Death, noted:
We don’t want to admit that we are fundamentally dishonest about reality, that we do not really control our lives. We don’t want to admit that we do not stand alone, that we always rely on something that transcends us, some system of ideas and powers in which we are embedded and which support us. This power is not always obvious. It need not be overtly a god or a stronger person, but it can be the power of an all-absorbing activity, a passion, a dedication to a game, a way of life, that like a comfortable web keeps a person buoyed up and ignorant of himself, of the fact that he does not rest on his own center.
This preoccupation with self-reliance flies in the face of today’s interconnected world. It also limits our potential. To understand this, think for a moment about computers. A computer by itself can make you productive in doing things like managing a business’s finances or writing a book. But a computer connected to the internet can do so much more.
The same applies to people. To succeed in life it’s not enough to simply be self-reliant; we need to be connected to the world around us as well.
Start Making Sense
Filed under: energy/flow, quanta | Tags: conservatives, Democrats, email, Fox News, liberals, Obama, reality, social norms
Leave a Comment There’s a new etiquette issue these days that Ann Landers never had to address: what do you do when a friend or relative forwards some wacky right wing spam?
Wacky right wing spam seems to be a growing phenomena. Such emails can be identified by breathless proclamations, like “uncovering” some “totalitarian socialist” plot by President Obama, Democrats or everyday liberals to “sell your country down the river.” They sometimes feature an abundance of words in CAPS and citations of conservatives’ favorite news source, Fox News. Usually they also contain an admonition to SEND THIS TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW.
That’s where friends of wacky right wing spammers come in. Since we’re friends with – or related to – the spammers, we get these emails. And then we’re faced with the question of what to do about them.
For many of us, the choice has been to ignore and not say a word about them. We know the content is either misguided, misleading or totally false. But we don’t want to get into some big ideological argument that could damage our relationship with the spammer. Besides, it’s hard to reason with someone when they’re all rev’d up about some unreasonable claim. Who has the energy for that?
But lately I’ve come to believe that just ignoring right wing spam doesn’t accomplish anything except encourage more of it. I think there’s something to be said for letting the person know, in as gentle a way as possible, that what they’re spreading is out of touch with reality as you know it and that you disagree with them. Citations from Snopes, Truth or Fiction and FactCheck can be useful in pointing the conversation back towards reality.
In essence, what this does is redefine their sense of the “social norms” for such points of view, without getting into a big (and unwinnable) argument about who’s right and who’s wrong. I don’t think we should try or expect to change anyone’s mind by doing this. But maybe we can make them aware of the fact that their “movement” is not really as mainstream and popular with their friends as they might believe, and maybe they should think a little about the truth of what they’re spreading. Hopefully, we can come to disagree without being disagreeable.
It seems worth a shot, anyways…
(BTW, all of this would be true for left wing spammers as well; but everyone I discuss this with these days finds the right wing spam much more common.)
<><><><>A Follow-up<><><><>
Thomas Friedman has a column in the NY Times today makes a similar point in discussing the absurd conservative claim that the President’s recent state trip to Asia cost $200 million a day. (He notes that the war in Afghanistan currently costs the US $190 million a day.) He closes by saying:
When widely followed public figures feel free to say anything, without any fact-checking, we have a problem. It becomes impossible for a democracy to think intelligently about big issues — deficit reduction, health care, taxes, energy/climate — let alone act on them. Facts, opinions and fabrications just blend together. But the carnival barkers that so dominate our public debate today are not going away — and neither is the Internet. All you can hope is that more people will do what Cooper did — so when the next crazy lie races around the world, people’s first instinct will be to doubt it, not repeat it.
Gee, it’s like he read my blog! 
Is THIS the American Century?
Filed under: interconnected, quanta | Tags: America, future, linked world
Leave a Comment If you read or watch the news these days, it’s hard to avoid the impression that the United States is a nation in decline. The economy is lousy, our military is over extended, our leaders – both in government and in the private sector – all too often seem to be only focused on their own wealth and power, and a portion of the American populace seems hellbent on preventing our government from taking any steps whatsoever to address our many problems.
On the face of it, we seem to be following in the footsteps of other great powers like Great Britain or the Soviet Union. Some have even suggested we’ve already become a banana republic. The world has changed and many of our leaders, either unwilling or unable to adapt and guide us through this change, appear eager to grab whatever they can while they still can.
But maybe, blinded by outmoded ways of understanding the world, we’re not seeing things as they really are. Maybe all the chaos and commotion we’re going through isn’t a sign of decline…maybe it’s a precursor to a potential rebirth.
This thought came to mind after reading David Brooks’ column The Crossroads Nation in today’s NY Times. Starting with the idea that creativity is a wellspring for economic growth, Brooks suggests:
…economic power in the 21st century is not going to look like economic power in the 20th century. The crucial fact about the new epoch is that creativity needs hubs. Information networks need junction points. The nation that can make itself the crossroads to the world will have tremendous economic and political power.
Brooks was apparently inspired in this view by an essay in Foreign Affairs by Anne-Marie Slaughter, now director of policy planning at the State Department. In “America’s Edge” Slaughter describes today’s interconnected world:
We live in a networked world. War is networked: the power of terrorists and the militaries that would defeat them depend on small, mobile groups of warriors connected to one another and to intelligence, communications, and support networks. Diplomacy is networked: managing international crises — from SARS to climate change — requires mobilizing international networks of public and private actors. Business is networked: every CEO advice manual published in the past decade has focused on the shift from the vertical world of hierarchy to the horizontal world of networks. Media are networked: online blogs and other forms of participatory media depend on contributions from readers to create a vast, networked conversation. Society is networked: the world of MySpace is creating a global world of “OurSpace,” linking hundreds of millions of individuals across continents. Even religion is networked: as the pastor Rick Warren has argued, “The only thing big enough to solve the problems of spiritual emptiness, selfish leadership, poverty, disease, and ignorance is the network of millions of churches all around the world.”
As Albert-Laszlo Barabasi observed in his book Linked, in such a world the key is to be a central hub of the network. A web site like Google will be much more important and influential than a tiny site like this blog. As Barabasi puts it, “popularity is attractive.” Those web sites/people/etc. with the most connections are likely to be the most successful.
Brooks suggests this creates an American advantage:
…the U.S. is well situated to be the crossroads nation. It is well situated to be the center of global networks and to nurture the right kinds of networks. Building that America means doing everything possible to thicken connections: finance research to attract scientists; improve infrastructure to ease travel; fix immigration to funnel talent; reform taxes to attract superstars; make study abroad a rite of passage for college students; take advantage of the millions of veterans who have served overseas.
However, I suspect some will be reluctant to join in the chorus of “It’s a small world after all.” As Robert Wright observed in an essay reflecting on our networked world: “Interdependence theory has a reputation on the right for being a namby-pamby doctrine for naive lefties.”
So Brooks may be right about America’s potential advantage in a networked world. But will his opinion have any influence on those of his conservative brethren who seem consumed by a rabid individualism that “refudiates” any suggestion that all of us – even those who may not “look American” – are in this together? And will their actions keep us from cashing in on this advantage?
The fate of America may hang in the balance…
The Benefits of Traveling Slower
Filed under: quanta, relativity | Tags: Iceland volcano, travel
Leave a Comment The New York Times had an op-ed piece a couple days ago titled “Escape From The Jet Age.” Reacting to the recent shut down of many flights to Europe due to a volcanic eruption in Iceland, Seth Stevenson extolled the benefits of not traveling by plane:
In the five decades or so since jets became the dominant means of long-haul travel, the world has benefited immeasurably from the speed and convenience of air travel. But as Orson Welles intoned in “The Magnificent Ambersons,” “The faster we’re carried, the less time we have to spare.” Indeed, airplanes’ accelerated pace has infected nearly every corner of our lives. Our truncated vacation days and our crammed work schedules are predicated on the assumption that everyone will fly wherever they’re going, that anyone can go great distances and back in a very short period of time.
In contrasting the experience of jet travel to that of slower forms of travel, Stevenson is actually engaging in a meditation on relativity. His argument in favor of slower travel is based on the observation that people traveling at different speeds will experience the world in different ways.
This is also true of other forms of transportation. The way I experience a road on a bicycle is totally different from the way I experience it in a car. I have a much fuller relationship with the road and the countryside around it when I’m on my bike.
Albert Einstein, the father of relativity and a bicyclist, would understand what we’re talking about: he thought up the theory of relativity while riding his bike.
Got to Get Back to the Garden
Filed under: emergent, quanta | Tags: conservatives, gardening, liberals, paradigms
Leave a Comment We are stardust, we are golden,
We are billion year old carbon,
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden.
- “Woodstock” by Joni Mitchell
We all have paradigms by which we understand the world around us. The ruling paradigm from the Newtonian age of science has been the world as a machine- the clockwork universe. We reflect this world view when we talk about being a “cog in a machine” or say we’re “running on all cylinders.”
Within the larger context, our personal, cultural and political values lead us to view the world in certain ways.
Some people tend to view the world as a jungle – filled with many scary things like terrorists, socialists and “feminazis.” Unless it concerns sex, drugs or other people they disagree with, these folks believe nothing is controllable and everything should be left to its own devices. To them, attempting to meddle and fix social, economic or environmental problems is both foolhardy and doomed to failure. They would also strongly argue that it would be an intrusion on individual freedom.
Other people tend to view the world like mechanics – if there is a problem with something, you fix it by tinkering with this, twiddling with that, and somehow or other gaining control over the situation so it can be corrected. To them, every problem is controllable if you have enough information and resources.
As I have previously argued, we need to learn to look at the world as a garden. Unlike a jungle, a garden can be managed, given sufficient expertise by the gardner and sufficient resources like water, nutrients, etc. However, unlike a mechanic, a gardener does not have direct control over the outcomes of his or her efforts. A gardener can’t precisely determine how many seeds will sprout, how many flowers will appear on a shrub or how quickly a tree will grow. In addition, a gardener can’t succeed when his or her efforts conflict with the garden’s environment: it’s not possible to grow bananas in Minnesota or weeping willows in Death Valley.
Instead, a good gardener focuses on creating the optimal conditions for a garden to flourish…then leaves it up to the plants to respond to those conditions.
“Pants” on the Web
Filed under: emergent, interconnected, quanta | Tags: linked world
Leave a Comment Over the past week a guy no one had ever heard of burst onto the scene, becoming a national – if not international – celebrity. He vowed to change things, and through his sudden fame he may be doing just that.
I’m talking of course about “General” Larry Platt, who appeared a week ago on American Idol and belted out his song “Pants on the Ground.”
As sometimes happens in today’s hyper-linked world, before you could say “Simon Cowell” Larry’s song became a world-wide phenomenon. People as diverse as Malaysian teenagers and Brett Favre and the Minnesota Vikings were soon singing “Pants on the Ground.”
It never ceases to amaze me how quickly and easily a performance like Larry’s can become such a big deal in so many different places. It reminded me of that guy Matt and his video Dancing 2008, which became a huge sensation a couple years ago.
These things are clearly a phenomenon of today’s world, and can teach us a couple of things:
1 – People from different walks of life and in different places can quickly find a common bond based on something they see and like, and
2 – This kind of thing often doesn’t last all that long. After all, whatever happened to Matt? And how many people regularly go back and look at that music video? (It’s still pretty cool though; I re-watched it while writing this post.)
So when we see some new phenomenon burst on the scene and become the talk of the nation, we need to maintain some perspective. Something that may seem like a big deal today – like, say, the results of a Massachusetts Senate race – may not be such a big deal tomorrow.
It certainly wouldn’t be wise to overreact to it.
Politics As Sport
Filed under: quanta | Tags: Democrats, politics, Republicans, sports
Leave a Comment A coworker approached me this morning clutching his copy of the NY Post. He was beaming, gloating about Republican Scott Brown beating Democrat Martha Coakley in Massachusetts’ special election for the Senate seat vacated by Ted Kennedy’s death. While he’d never said a word when McCain and the Republicans were trounced in the 2008 elections, he was happy to talk about how the Republican Party was “coming back strong now.”
Interestingly, his manner and way of speaking were identical to office conversations about sports teams. While I’m not a baseball fan, I did enjoy it when the Red Sox beat the Yankees in 2004. Office Yankees fans didn’t have much to say back then, but after that there were times when Yankees successes were followed by similar office trash talk.
I’ve had the feeling for some time now that for at least some people the rivalry between Democrats and Republicans is very much like a sports rivalry – like that between Red Sox fans and Yankees fans. Instead of reasoned debate about important issues, we get mindless comments about teams and opponents. Check out these comments on today’s NY Post web site:
Regarding recent Yankees free agent signings -
HEY SON
01/19/2010 9:31 PM
BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAAAA THE BEST TEAM IN BASEBALL GOT BETTER !
THAT HAS GOT TO KILL YOU SON !
28 IN 20-10 !
Regarding the Massachusetts Senate race -
LEGION57
01/20/2010 5:00 PM
Hey osama obama- prex ZERO, YOU LOSE- ahhhhaaaahahahahahahahaaaaa
Yeah, I’m sure that’s the kind of debate the founding fathers envisioned back in 1776.
It’s not surprising that politics has been imbued with the same emotional fervor – and lack of reason – as sports. After all, that is how politics is now presented by the media. But as Jay Rosen said in his piece back in 2004:
I hope other journalists confronting the political puzzles of 2004 will read James, read Adam Nagourney and Jim VandeHei and hear their defiant cry: Horse Race Now! Horse Race Tomorrow! Horse Race Forever! And I hope other journalists will ask themselves: must this go on indefinitely?
Let’s hope not. Meanwhile, I think it would help if the Democrats actually developed some new Big Ideas that would guide them in governing and help voters understand their agenda. And it might be useful to view the events in Massachusetts with some perspective and humor. (As usual, Jon Stewart has been great.)
