Animals are dying! Birds are falling from the sky! Fish are washing onto beaches by the millions! It's the end of the world!
Showing posts with label editorial. Show all posts
Showing posts with label editorial. Show all posts
Friday, January 7, 2011
Monday, January 3, 2011
Boxes: A Tale of Abstraction
After watching the beautiful first video from Information Is Beautiful (appropriately named, aren't they?), I can't help but throw another naive rallying cry out into the void for a shift along our production possibilities frontier from knives to butter. It all looks so simple! If that box is that big and this box is only this big, shouldn't we be able to move a little from that box to this box? Come on! They're just boxes!
Monday, December 20, 2010
Life During (Almost?) Wartime
Somewhere roughly 125 miles to the west of me, South Korean shells are presumably (hopefully) plunking harmlessly into the water. And, as always, the sensation of being caught between what I read on CNN and what I see around me is difficult to reconcile. Two large cranes operate just outside my window, constructing a new building as Seoul continues to march further down the path of development. Across the street, students bundled in parkas against the cold rush into a Gimbap Chungook (think traditional Korean McDonald's) for an early dinner before their hogwan starts. Buses filled with people lumber through the all-too-narrow streets and everything crackles with activity.
It is amazing to think of the difference between South and North Korea. Conceptually we all understand the great disparity in standard of living but it's different to really feel it. Put yourself in the shoes of a North Korean for a moment and look again at the scene. The new construction, free of any government planning or party oversight, cropping up organically. The students, unique yet uniform in their stylized self-expression, entering a restaurant overflowing with food and patrons, with ten similar establishments within a two minute walk in any direction. This very building, 8 stories tall with no less than four individual hogwans in it, all doing brisk business. And the streets, a constant stream of traffic, rushing hither and fro, each with unknowable purpose.
It is an overwhelming sensation, an impossibly complex tableau of activity. How can there be so many cars? How can there be so many stores and restaurants? How can organic creation produce such order? The inability of our minds to fully grasp the details of a thriving capitalist system is reason number one why centrally planned economies cannot work. And the very idea that this scene might be threatened by a few errant shells 125 miles to the west is equally confounding. One cannot imagine such a scene from scratch but, now it is laid out before us, one cannot imagine it stopping. Perhaps all it will take to free North Koreans from their indoctrination is an afternoon stroll through Seoul.
It is amazing to think of the difference between South and North Korea. Conceptually we all understand the great disparity in standard of living but it's different to really feel it. Put yourself in the shoes of a North Korean for a moment and look again at the scene. The new construction, free of any government planning or party oversight, cropping up organically. The students, unique yet uniform in their stylized self-expression, entering a restaurant overflowing with food and patrons, with ten similar establishments within a two minute walk in any direction. This very building, 8 stories tall with no less than four individual hogwans in it, all doing brisk business. And the streets, a constant stream of traffic, rushing hither and fro, each with unknowable purpose.
It is an overwhelming sensation, an impossibly complex tableau of activity. How can there be so many cars? How can there be so many stores and restaurants? How can organic creation produce such order? The inability of our minds to fully grasp the details of a thriving capitalist system is reason number one why centrally planned economies cannot work. And the very idea that this scene might be threatened by a few errant shells 125 miles to the west is equally confounding. One cannot imagine such a scene from scratch but, now it is laid out before us, one cannot imagine it stopping. Perhaps all it will take to free North Koreans from their indoctrination is an afternoon stroll through Seoul.
The Age of Enlightenment
New evidence from Gallup shows that 40% of Americans believe God created humans 10,000 years ago. Another poll illustrates the relationship between what news you watch and your propensity to believe ideas that are demonstrably false. How susceptible humans are to believing what we're told instead of what we can see with our own eyes. And if this is the situation in America, one of the world's most powerful, educated, and prosperous countries, imagine how long it will take to undo 60 years of propaganda in North Korea.
This is an important reminder how fragile our progress is and how quickly our civilization can be wiped out. New ways of understanding our world are not permanently solidified in our popular thinking as soon as they have been discovered. We dangle in a loose web of rationality over the gaping maw of the unknown. Should this web be broken, we will once again be surrounded by an incomprehensible universe in the blink of our species' eye. (Not that we've got it all figured out now mind you, but progress is progress.) A second dark age is just a shout away.
What is most confounding about our slow inching toward ignorance is that so little effort is given to reaching out to the blind with cold, hard facts. Those of us who accept the strong scientific evidence on which our theories of evolution and global warming rest, seem to lack the energy or interest in demonstrating this evidence to those who don't believe. Even the rationals have bought into the idea that our positions have more to do with faith than with fact and it is in this folly that the seeds of our undoing are sown.
Faith and fact are the twin pillars of our understanding of this reality. They must coexist but they should not overlap. Fact can explain much but where its descriptive ability fails, it must be filled in with faith. In a way, the two combine to form a geopolitical map of our universe. As the territories claimed by one are lost to the other, overlap and conflict will occur.
In the branch of physics, there are the contested territories of the Big Bang and the Gulf of Gravity along with smaller conflicts in the regions of the Speed of Light and various related sci-fi tropes. In the theater of biology, most of the fighting is on the Plains of Evolution with smaller skirmishes in the Archipelago of Cells, particularly among the Islands of Stem and the Sperm-Egg Strait. Across the theaters of both chemistry and biology, violence plays out along the Environmental Coast.
Too much territory is being given up to faith where facts should be digging in. While it would be nice to destroy those mouthpieces of ignorance, Fox News and various extremists, this would be an ineffective way to win the war. Rather, the facts need only be paraded again and again until their clarifying light wins out. The truth will set us free eventually. No matter how far back into the dark ages we may slip, the human mind will always be swayed by fact as long as the fact is available. We are caught in a shouting match between the ignorant and the educated. It is time for the educated to shout louder.
This is an important reminder how fragile our progress is and how quickly our civilization can be wiped out. New ways of understanding our world are not permanently solidified in our popular thinking as soon as they have been discovered. We dangle in a loose web of rationality over the gaping maw of the unknown. Should this web be broken, we will once again be surrounded by an incomprehensible universe in the blink of our species' eye. (Not that we've got it all figured out now mind you, but progress is progress.) A second dark age is just a shout away.
What is most confounding about our slow inching toward ignorance is that so little effort is given to reaching out to the blind with cold, hard facts. Those of us who accept the strong scientific evidence on which our theories of evolution and global warming rest, seem to lack the energy or interest in demonstrating this evidence to those who don't believe. Even the rationals have bought into the idea that our positions have more to do with faith than with fact and it is in this folly that the seeds of our undoing are sown.
Faith and fact are the twin pillars of our understanding of this reality. They must coexist but they should not overlap. Fact can explain much but where its descriptive ability fails, it must be filled in with faith. In a way, the two combine to form a geopolitical map of our universe. As the territories claimed by one are lost to the other, overlap and conflict will occur.
In the branch of physics, there are the contested territories of the Big Bang and the Gulf of Gravity along with smaller conflicts in the regions of the Speed of Light and various related sci-fi tropes. In the theater of biology, most of the fighting is on the Plains of Evolution with smaller skirmishes in the Archipelago of Cells, particularly among the Islands of Stem and the Sperm-Egg Strait. Across the theaters of both chemistry and biology, violence plays out along the Environmental Coast.
Too much territory is being given up to faith where facts should be digging in. While it would be nice to destroy those mouthpieces of ignorance, Fox News and various extremists, this would be an ineffective way to win the war. Rather, the facts need only be paraded again and again until their clarifying light wins out. The truth will set us free eventually. No matter how far back into the dark ages we may slip, the human mind will always be swayed by fact as long as the fact is available. We are caught in a shouting match between the ignorant and the educated. It is time for the educated to shout louder.
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