Month: May 2009

Science in action

There’s a story on the Tunguska Event at Popular Mechanics.

A study suggests that it was caused by a comet that broke off a piece in the atmosphere over the region while the rest of the comet left the atmosphere and carried on back into space. The fireball was caused by hydrogen gas released by the comet, which was previously dissolved in the comet’s ice.

Some points about this story:

It’s really cool. If we could (as they think they might have done) track a comet that had previously hit earth – just wow.

It’s almost certainly not true. It’s guess piled on guess piled on supposition.

That it probably isn’t true is not a criticism. The story quotes another Russian scientist as being “impressed but not convinced”. Me too. Just showing that the theory is consistent with the (little) evidence we have is worthwhile. Some researchers might argue that existing evidence is not consistent with the theory. Some will look for new evidence. If new evidence is found which is consistent with the theory, that will strengthen it.

Imagine if the theory had some obvious political relevance. How would the process work then?

The paper is on arxiv.org

Margaret Moran

An M.P. is supposed to spend time in the constituency she represents, and also in Parliament. Margaret Moran represents Luton South.

Now, it is perfectly possible to live in Luton South and work in Central London – I know, because I’ve done it for over a decade. I’ve spent 2 hours a day, five days a week on a train for that time, costing me getting on for four thousand pounds a year at today’s prices. Note that this is not considered a legitimate expense, so I have to pay income tax on the money I spend traveling.

So I’m a little bit miffed that my MP gets the maintenance of her second home in London counted as a legitimate expense that she doesn’t have to pay tax on. More than that, since the expense is paid by her employer, the state, she not only doesn’t pay tax on it, she doesn’t pay at all.

Now, a bunch of people have been complaining about all this for a while. Good luck to them, but in my merely “miffed” state, I haven’t bothered to join in.

After all, there is one small difference between me and my MP. I chose to live 20 miles from my place of work, her role as an MP means she more or less needs to. So there is some thin kind of argument about her 2-location life being more of a necessary expense than mine. Irritating, but not worth making a huge fuss about.

And now details have been published, it emerges she claimed GBP22,500 for dry rot treatment for her second home.

In Southampton.

OK, now I am no longer miffed.
(For the geographically challenged, Southampton is 80 miles from Westminster, and 94 from Luton)

There is a video of her making pathetic justifications on the BBC. Again, the reason why my employer is not allowed to pay my train fare, even if it wanted to, is because I do not have to live such a distance from my office. There are all sorts of good reasons why I choose to do so, but at the end of the day, I have to pay the fare out of my taxed income because it’s my lifestyle choice.

Moran says that it is essential for her to have three properties because her partner lives in Southampton. Well, guess what. My wife lives in Luton, but that doesn’t mean I can claim the costs of being based in Luton and London as a business expense. It was her choice to come to Luton to run for Parliament, and it is her choice to have a partner who won’t move from Southampton, and reasonable as those choices may be, they are her choices to spend her own money on.

(There was a time when candidates who came to an area in order to stand were frowned upon. I don’t think that’s important – the “local” element of M.P. work is not sensible – but if candidates do want to move from their homes to another area where they think they’ll get elected, they can do so at their own expense.)

Brown and Me

I haven’t signed the “Resign” petition. (Shock! Horror!)

That is not, in fact, because of any respect for him left over from his first term as Chancellor. He does not deserve to be running the government.

But what does it mean to ask him to resign? Either we (a) get another non-entity machine politician from the Labour front bench, or (b) we get a general election where presumably Cameron gets in.

I’m not at all happy with the constitution we have, but having governments chased out of power as soon as they lose the confidence of the media is not likely to improve it. The ousting of Brown would not be a victory in any sense – it would be the psychological substitute for a victory.

If there’s any coherency to my present political position, it is a rejection of psychological substitutes for victory. That is why I can be an activist for the Libertarian Party UK while my guru Mencius writes about “the fundamental comedy of democratic libertarianism – a proposition no less grimly hilarious for its infinite boneheadedness.” Being unsatisfied not just with Tony Blair but also with Gordon Brown, and also with the Labour Party, and also with the Conservative Party, are steps on the road to being unsatisfied with our democracy. Future steps to guide my comrades through are being dissatisfied with democracy itself. I don’t, of course, need a majority to go through this process, but whatever can be done in the end, I’m not likely to do it on my own.

So, if you want to take the system at its word, vote LPUK. After that fails, come with me and Menc….

Climate and Science

Patrick Crozier writes (a couple of weeks ago, but I’ve been distracted) that libertarians should actually talk about the economics of climate change, and that the best defence is rapid economic growth that can only happen through a freer market.

It sounds pretty reasonable. I think, as a practical matter, the association of libertarianism with climate denial is harmful to our public image. We would be better off accepting climate science, and, as Patrick says, dealing with the economics.

The trouble with that, as reasonable as it seems, is that I can’t do it.

At least it solves one thing. I used to worry that my view of the science was being influenced by my politics, that I was hostile to AGW because it was inconvenient to libertarianism, rather than because of its merits. But I find, that if it comes to a choice between libertarianism and climate denial, I’m more convinced of the scientific question than the political one. Libertarianism has bigger problems than Global Warming. (In a word, democracy)

Indeed, and this is yet another point due to Mencius, I would say that in the long run, the closed loop of “official science” is the biggest problem of the managerial state. I was trying to work up to this gradually before I got sidetracked.

Frankly, if I was to rely only on work produced within the last 50 years, I wouldn’t believe in evolution. It’s only the work done before the state took over all science that convinces me (and the fact that it’s simple enough that I can work through it for myself). By the time we finally give up on global warming (in 25 years or so), science will be so utterly discredited that it will be irrelevant – gone the way of theatre, or sittings of the House of Lords – something that is still done because the state funds it, but nobody can quite remember what the original point was.

Retreat into history

The reason I’ve gone very quiet of late is that two weeks ago I visited Bletchley Park, and was so fascinated by the details of the cryptanalysis of Enigma that I’ve spent every spare moment since working out the crib/bombe technique, and implementing software simulations to verify my understanding.

I had what I think was a working bombe simulator by last weekend, but running in ruby on my netbook, it was somewhat slower (for a moderately complex menu) than the 1942 electromechanical version. Not having the resources of a state war machine to draw on, that makes it a bit too time-consuming to actually test the process. Every optimisation I attempted made it slower, so I have resorted to a C++ port of my ruby code, which is not yet complete.

(I am aware that many simulators already exist – the point of my simulator is to demonstrate to myself that I know how it is supposed to work).

There’s loads of important stuff to write about, but I just can’t put this down right now.