We Are Family: I read today that the Prime Minister of Poland resigned after a political tiff, and the President, Lech Kaczynski, appointed his identical twin brother Jaroslaw to take his place. So, the government of Poland has become a family affair. Poland is now being run by biological clones. It should be interesting to see how that works out.

But lest you think they’re completely nuts over there, sixty percent of Poles think that having brothers in the top two government jobs is bad for the country, according to a PBS Center survey.

Let’s hope that these guys aren’t in any way related to Ted Kaczynski, the American “Unibomber”.

We Are Family, Part II: In Newark the other day, police arrested a man while he was attending his father’s funeral. The cops received a tip that the guy had shot and killed the old man a few days before, and would be at the church. Allegedly, Bernard Hoover, age 21, shot his father, 51 year old Earnest Hoover, after the senior Mr. Hoover got involved in a fight between his son and his son’s girlfriend. Hmmm, that would not have been a great idea on a hot summer night (admittedly, that’s said with 20-20 hindsight).

Nonetheless, I take my hat off to whoever dropped the dime on the younger Mr. Hoover. Ratting-out is not a popular thing to do in Newark these days. But the cheekiness of mourning your own father’s death in church after you killed him (assuming that the story holds up in a court of law) obviously violates even the most cynical standards of life and death in the nastiest of neighborhoods. So, they’re not completely nuts over there either.

In trying to get a better grip on quantum physics, the average Joe or Josephine would do well to also acquaint him or herself with Nietzsche. One of Nietzsche’s major tenants is that there is no “core of reality” which lies behind our perceptions, i.e. what exists “out there” beyond our minds. Well, maybe there is something, but it’s not like anything we’ve ever known.

Yea, this sounds like the quantum world already. Nietzsche called his own metaphysical view “perspectivism”: there is no singular truth or truths about “life, the universe and everything”. There is no one ultimate, objective truth that is the same for everyone. Everything depends upon perspective. Indeed, this sounds a lot like quantum physics, where measurement is everything; you see what you set out to see, e.g. wave or particle, momentum or position, spin or whatever. You don’t get to the core of it, because . . . . well, maybe there is no core! There is no “God’s eye view”, because, as Nietzsche famously said: God is dead.

In 1900, God turned the tables, and Nietzsche was dead. But ironically, 1900 was also the year that quantum theory was born, when Max Planck presented a paper before the Berlin Physical Society showing how the concept of non-divisible “energy packets” or “quanta” solved a bunch of conceptual problems regarding energy radiation. So, quantum theory was born right there in Nietzsche’s German fatherland, just as he died. After a few more decades of research and conceptualization, scientists found out that the quantum micro-world of electrons and photons and quarks was a very un-Godlike place, where things happen for no reason whatsoever. But luckily for us, when billions and billions of random, meaningless events team up in certain ways, meaning and lawfulness emerges (good old “quantum decoherence”, and it’s conceptual cousin “emergent phenomenon”).

And yet, on the personal, conscious level, our lives often seem like a meaningless, random string of events. Let’s hope that a metaphysical anology follows — that even though our day-to-day experiences can be cold, cruel and random, the big picture that eventually emerges from all of them in fact DOES have a theme and does have meaning behind it. Allow me to repeat that Zen-like line from The Man From UNCLE that I so often use: “if you’re nowhere, then you ARE somewhere” (spoken by Robert Vaughn, aka agent Napolean Solo). That’s what wisdom and faith are all about. Even Fredrich Nietzsche could probably dig that. (Cut to “Man From UNCLE” theme song.)

AH, LOOK AT ALL THE LONELY PEOPLE: There were some articles in the local newspapers and the weekly news magazines recently about a study published in the June, 2006 American Sociological Review regarding friendship. Based on nationwide surveys done in 1985 and 2004, the study indicated that Americans now have fewer friends and fewer people that they can talk face-to-face with about their problems.

And I thought it was just me.

The poll indicated that the average number of close friends that people have declined from three to two between ’85 and ’04. Furthermore, the proportion of folk who don’t have anyone around to discuss personal stuff with went from 1 in 8 to 1 in 4. Great news for shrinks, but not for those “seeking community”. As social isolation increases, fewer people get involved with things like volunteer fire departments and the Red Cross. If you get sick or old and have to go to the hospital or a nursing home, don’t count on having many visitors. And if there’s a disaster like Hurricane Katrina in your hometown, don’t count on getting a ride if you don’t have a car, or even if you do, you may not have anyone to stay with.

Alienation does have its costs. I would postulate that it contributes to the study findings showing that Americans are generally less healthy than the British and most Europeans, despite much greater spending on health care here. When one is alone a lot, food often becomes one’s solace. That would contribute to the high obesity rate here in America, which eventually contributes to many diseases (diabetes, heart problems, stroke).

So how did we get here? The study authors (Laurie Thorner and Lynn Smith-Lovin) blame the fact that people work longer hours, commute longer distances to work, and also that more women forsake housewife status for careers; this makes it harder to maintain ties with neighbors and even family. They also cite technology changes, i.e. more TV viewing and computer use.

I myself would agree with that, but I think there’s something more fundamental going on. I’m an economist at heart, so I think it’s tied to wealth and money. Despite all our complaints, America is the richest nation in the world. Even though wealth is getting more and more concentrated over time, most people in America have at least some discretionary income at most points in their life, and thus have a lot more opportunity to do what they want versus most anywhere else in the world.

Being able to do what you want is great; I love it. You can study what you want while in college or trade school, have a career in the field of your choice, move to the part of the country that you like, take up any number of different hobbies and interests, enjoy a wide choice of music and entertainment, select from a wide range of political views and social causes and religions (or not). And then throw in the great mixture of races and ethnicities and nationalities and immigrants here in America; and the fact that they increasingly fight to maintain their identity, versus blending-in as “average Americans”.

But guess what? The side-effect is that we all become one-of-a-kind. It’s hard to find anything to talk about other than the weather. Back when I was a kid, and even in college in the early 1970s, there were only three television stations to watch, and maybe four or five radio stations that were popular. You got a car from either GM or Ford or Chrysler, either a sedan, compact or mid-size. There were only so many movies to go see — at the local movie house, because video and DVD did not yet exist. Middle class life had a familiar pattern to it. Most people in my area were second or third generation Euro-ethnics. I know that this was not paradise; I agree that segregation and closed-mindedness are bad things. But it was a lot easier to relate to people around you when there was more common ground. For example, there seemed to be more civility on the roads and highways; I don’t remember all this ‘road rage’, with people willing to cut you off and run a yellow light to get to their destination 30 seconds faster.

[And then there’s blogging, of which I am also guilty. There are a million blogs out there. But how many of those does any one person find interesting? One, two, maybe three if you’re lucky?]

Is this really a problem, or is it just another nostalgic lament about how we lost something when we went from rags to riches? Technology and wealth make it easier to stay in touch with people from our past. We live in a mobile society today; those friends we do find are likely to move eventually. But with e-mail and telephone and cheap air-fares, it’s easier to stay in touch. If I had to answer the study survey, I’d say that I don’t have any close friends within 20 miles. But there is still a handful of people who I could talk with on a deeper level, in various parts of the country. Nevertheless, it’s extremely hard these days for me to make new friends, especially on the level of sharing one’s most important concerns and interests. Maybe it’s an aging Baby Boomer thing; maybe this survey just reflects the fact that there are more people in their 50s and 60s these days, and older people generally have a harder time making new friends.

I guess I’ll have to leave it to the sociologists to figure out what’s going on here. But it does help to know that I’m not the only one having a hard time “finding community” these days. I’ve heard a lot of people, especially the idealist kind, talk about community, about living in a place where people sit on porches and stop and talk on the streets and in the local stores. But now I know why they talk about community so much; because it just doesn’t exist anymore!

One final example: a few years back, my apartment building (a house divided up into six dwelling units) was sold. We have a porch in front, but under the old owner (who lived here), no one ever used it; the owner and his family came from Italy, and this is an extremely non-Italian neighborhood. So he pretty much discouraged anyone from hanging out on the porch, afraid perhaps of attracting “the wrong element”. The new owner is a bit younger, and seems a bit more “communitarian”. Even though he doesn’t live here, he put out a swing and a bench and table with chairs around it. For a while there, some of the tenants tried it out. But now we’ve pretty much gone back to an empty porch. We just don’t have much to talk to each other about; we all have other things to do with our spare time. You just can’t change the flow of American social trends with a swing and a few chairs and a romantic vision of the past.

What we have here is a recently abandoned car dealership. It’s a slightly eeerie sight. Not too long ago, this place was alive with shiny new SUVs and pickups and vans and sedans. There were real live salesmen preying on the vanity of real live customers, recommending package options that included 8-way power seats, cruise control, lumbar adjustment, performance suspension, power sunroof, alloy wheels, all the stuff you really do need. They were there to talk about trade-in value, financing terms, sound systems, matching floor rugs, “get you a special deal with my manager”, and on and on. Now the manager is gone, the service bay is empty, the lot is desolate, and the phones ring no more. The last shiny new Explorer and Mustang and Ranger have been driven off the lot (this was a Ford dealer). It almost seems as though a bit of the American dream has died.

Well, actually not. This isn’t the start of a social revolution; gasoline hasn’t hit $10 a gallon yet. This was one of the last of the small, in-town car dealerships that were typical back in the 1950s. The trend today is toward big mega-auto malls out on the highways along the suburban fringes. (Their locations are very inconvenient for most people to go to for service — which is just fine with the dealers, as they don’t want to hear about your problems once you’ve signed the dotted line; the days of the local merchant who stands by his product and is there for you is a thing of the distant past, with cars and with most everything else).

But let me dream for a moment. What if American decided to finally bite the bullet and end its century-old love affair with the car. What if we decided to set up a high-quality public transport system with plenty of busses and trains and computer-assisted paratransit systems that could respond to your pick-up requests within a half hour. What if we perfected some kind of rechargeable electric-assist motorized bicycles for short trips, and allowed you to bring them on board all the new busses and trains that you would now depend on (with recharging outlets)? Yea, I can hear the objections — what about the snowy winters, especially up north? And on rainy days? And do you want to ride a bike three miles on a humid 100 degree day in Florida or Texas? (And yet, people still buy motorcycles). What about the elderly? Or pregnant women? What about people who live way out in the middle of nowhere, in the Kentucky hollows or Nevada desert or in the wheatfields of South Dakota?

Yes, leaving the auto (and its small-truck cousins) behind is a whole lot more complex that it sounds at first, just because over the past century our way of life has been built up around it. But someday the oil that all of this depends on may not be there, not in sufficient quantities anyway. And hydrogen and battery power (or hybrids) may not come to the rescue either, at least not at the volume and price levels that are necessary to keep the party going. So perhaps it isn’t too early to ponder the sight of this abandoned car dealership and consider what a world without autos (or with fewer and much smaller autos) would be like.

A lot would have to change here in America, and some people would suffer for it. But with enough Yankee ingenuity, I think it would eventually be all right. There would be some major changes; some towns would shrink or disappear, others would grow. Life would be different. But it might be healthy and even pleasant to use your own muscles to get around again along streets filled with pedestrians and bikes, mostly free of cars and trucks (other than occasional paratransit buses and delivery vehicles). No more 8 mile traffic jams, no more horrible high-speed collisions out on icy Interstates, no more road rage, no more drunk driving tragedies, no more honking and flipping the bird at the guy who just cut you off, less smog and less global warming . . . . and no more car dealerships and “I’ll talk to the manager.”

Really now, just why are we fighting to preserve all of this?

OFFICE SPOUSES AND GHOSTLY SIGNALS: I heard a lady talking this morning on the local NPR radio station about “office marriages”. These are close, somewhat flirtatious friendships between a man and a woman in the workplace, where both (hopefully) are otherwise committed. According to the rules of the game, as spelled out this morning, office spouses know enough not to overstep the boundaries of propriety, but crowd the line nonetheless. They go out to lunch sometimes, exchange gossip regularly, and maybe even share ‘innocent’ innuendoes of sexual interest now and then, so long as these are made in good taste and are not acted upon (but are simply greeted by a sly and understanding smile). According to the NPR report, such office relationships are a dime a dozen.

Hmm. Can’t say that I’ve been in any such relationships. Nor that I want to be. But now that you mention it, I can think of some happily married women at work who seem to want to be my friend. To a guy like me, whose brain was never wired to “read the signals” that most people recognize instinctively, such approaches are usually confusing. At first I wonder, are these chicks interested in dating? (I’m not very nosy, so I don’t keep track of who is “available” and who is not). Then I see the ring (or rings, in many cases) on the left hand, so I wonder, what the hell — is this an invitation to adultery? Oh goody, that’s all I need; a jealous hubby coming after me following a rushed and probably not very satisfying little attempt at orgasmic exchange somewhere.

But now that it’s all been explained, it makes more sense. Nonetheless, I still very much dislike it. I hate all the “unspoken rules” and complex signals that go on between people, especially men and women. I believe in denotation, not connotation. Basically I don’t pick up on subtle signals that people send my way; and as far as I’m concerned, that’s all for the best. It’s a “fail-safe” situation; i.e., nothing happens (other than my reputation as a dork grows).

But then again, I’m not a total reptile. I still try to be nice to people who are nice to me. So, there are some married women who keep flitting around the edges of my radar screen at work. Just today, one of my “clients” came over to my cubicle to borrow a pen so as to correct something on a document, then stood next to me as she made her corrections on my desk, chatting pleasantly all along. Then about an hour later, she and her hubby (who works for the same agency as I do; luckily he’s usually assigned to a different location, as he carries a gun!) were near by, discussing things in the manner that definitely-married couples do.

Well, OK. So now I know. But still, I wake up some mornings and say, just how the heck did I get stuck on this planet?

I’d rather have talked here about quantum theory and how a non-mathematician like me can best understand it. After reading about 10 different books on quantum theory over the past 20 years, I’ve finally formed my own way of thinking about quantum particles and their weird, weird behavior. In a nutshell, I think of them as mixtures of particles, little spaces where the particle can jump around in, and waves. The wave defines probability zones within the little space where the particle jumps, defining where it should be more frequently and less frequently, on average.

For the next big insight, you need to use what you remember regarding the concepts behind differential calculus to understand how the particle jumps around within the little space. I.e., it sits still for an infinitely small differential in time, then moves at random to another point within the little space over an infinitely small differential in time, at an infinitely high speed (yes, faster than light speed), then repeats the process over and over. What happens? The system becomes a cloud, a “superposition” where the quantum particle appears at least once (and in the high-probability areas, much more than once) everywhere within the little space, during any finite interval in time. The particle is smeared over the little space, which can travel thru the air like a ghost. In fact, the beam of electrons in your TV or CRT is like a conga-line of ghosts, flying across the tube.

The final concept is that this wave, and the little space around the particle that the wave governs, can get warped and twisted when it slams into something substantial (i.e., meets up with a high-energy situation or a wall of many, many quantum particles organized together into atoms and molecules). This sometimes causes “wavefunction collapse”, where the ghost wave shrinks into a tiny particle at a definite location, e.g. a little dot on that TV or CRT screen.

Well, I’ll stop here, but I hope to post a page on my site in the near future to flesh out my “rough” way of thinking about the quantum particle. I think that it helps explain (to the non-scientist mind) all the weird stuff like interference, Young’s double slit experiment, Schrodinger’s Cat, decoherence, faster-than-light speed quantum travel, quantum tunneling past a barrier that particles should not otherwise be able to get through, etc.

And it does all this without totally abandoning “realism”, without getting lost in the abstractions of universes that split up each time a particle comes to a fork in its pathway (such that all possibilities are realized) and other way-out-there explanations that physicists and philosophers offer. I don’t claim this to be a 100% accurate view of quantum mechanics (or even as accurate and precise as presently possible). But it’s still a whole lot better for the average Joe than going on Wikipedia and looking up the various articles about quantum physics, reading stuff written by young grad students who discuss eigenvectors and Hilbert spaces and tensor operations with glee (knowing full well that the average person reading the article has no idea what that gibberish is all about). They’re just being show-offs.

But nonetheless, sometimes I wish I was in back in their nerdy world (I went to engineering school and learned a fair amount about basic physics), dealing with those obtuse but ultimately rational mathematical concepts and symbols. As opposed to my little office environment of today, with its even more confusing realm of ghostly and slightly dangerous signals from married women.

What’s this? A hurricane-season weather map of the Caribbean under LSD? Microbes under magnification? A barnyard floor after a goat gets sick? Or maybe just a really poor attempt at computer art? Well, my blog as been criticized as being overly “word-driven”, so I’m just trying to get in touch with the other side of the brain, with the visual side of human experience. Yea, I know what you’re probably thinking: stick with the left side. Get back to word abstractions, not abstract art (or whatever the heck this is). OK, fine.

Speaking of the brain, I’ve been continuing my readings on the topic of human consciousness. The latest read is A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness by V.S. Ramachandran. Dr. Ramachandran (aka “Rama”) is a neuroscientist, and this is definitely a nuts-and-bolts approach to the brain and how consciousness is created within it. Not that Dr. Rama, or anyone else, quite knows yet just how consciousness is in fact created amidst all those squishy neurons and electric pulses residing up above your eyebrows. But the good doctor can and does take a lot of interesting guesses.

One point that Ramachandran makes is that experimental evidence shows that conscious decisions to move some part of the body (the finger, the arm, the mouth, etc.) are actually set in place in the brain before we become aware of it. Well OK, that makes sense in a highly instinctual situation like eating, fighting or sex. But even in a calm mood, the decision to get up out of a chair or reach for a telephone is already in motion by the time that you think you are deciding to do such a thing. It’s almost as if there is a “zombie self”, a machine up there in the head, which really decides what to do. The conscious part thinks it is calling the shots, but in reality it is simply watching. (This is called epiphenomenalism). A lot of consciousness scholars would say that it’s even worse than this; my whole description here is totally wrong, as it still assumes “the little man within”. They say that we have to get used to a whole new way of thinking about what we really are.

These are Alice-In-Wonderland times we are living in. Is anything really as it seems to be?

One more bumpy segue here: A guy at work who knows some Middle-Eastern Arab people said that his friends believe that al-Zarqawi’s death was something like an old-fashioned Mafia rub-out. They postulate that there are ongoing arguments and power struggles between the various factions within the Iraqi insurgency, and that some factions recently decided that al-Zarqawi had gotten a little too big for his britches. So they got in touch with the United States military, and we agreed to do their dirty work. It keeps them from walking down the “Arab street” with Arab blood on their hands (especially since it’s an intra-Sunni thing).

Hmmm, something to think about. It’s possible that the local Iraqi insurgency factions, with their Baathist / Saddam Hussein roots, decided that the al Qaeda outsiders represented by al-Zarqawi and their pan-Sunni Arabist theologies were no longer useful and desirable. If so, I see two implications: first the local insurgency in Iraq now feels strong enough and confident enough to work alone; not an indication that the US will successfully establish a stable democratic government in Iraq. But second, the al Qaeda idea of uniting the Islamic world against the west is thus not catching fire. Anti-westernism is still a strong and dangerous current in that world, and the risk of terrorism is going to be with us for a long, long time. But as to the al Qaeda ideology fostering a war of the empires, akin to our rivalry with the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s . . . . that probably ain’t going to happen.

Which is still a bad thing for us, as the USA knows what to do against other empires, being an empire ourselves. We don’t do as well when a set of unaffiliated but similarly motivated tribes peck at us from a variety of directions. Throughout the history of the great empires (Chinese, Indian, Roman, Ottoman, British, American), that has often been the beginning of the end. Can American ingenuity keep history from repeating itself? Stay tuned; our accustomed way of life here in Rome, err, America, is riding on this one.