Fantasy for Atheists

Atheism has really won a major victory when fantasy is being written for atheists. Witness,

• Serpent In Paradise - LOTR for Atheists
• The Last Ring-bearer - LOTR for Scientists
• The Salvation War - Dante's Inferno for Atheists
• Methods of Rationality- Harry Potter for Atheists
• A Thin Veneer - Babylon 5 for Atheists
• His Dark Materials - Narnia for Atheists

The psychologically defining trait of atheism isn't the disbelief in all powerful aliens, it's the refusal to accord them any special status. What else is Humanism but the capacity to judge gods' actions by human standards and their existence by human reason.

Note that Babylon 5's Lorien functioned as a higher god to whom the mortals appealed the angels' and demons' misdeeds. B5 was incredibly medieval in its philosophy - not unexpected from an American.

Honourable mention is made to Magestic where the protagonist refuses to accept or bow down to the all powerful remorseless force of Destiny.

On The Supposed Constancy Of Human Nature

An oft repeated lie by anthropologists and other liberal arts scum is that "technology advances but human nature is a constant".

That's such a load of crap. In just the last 40 years rape has all but disappeared from the civilized world (check the stats!). And it's all thanks to pornography redirecting men's sexual energy away from actual women. Something women aren't thankful for, surprise surprise.

For comparison, in medieval times, every city woman would have been gang raped by street children at least once. And in ancient times they didn't even see anything unusual, let alone wrong, with rape - it was so common.

It works exactly the same way as violent crimes going down when violent movies are showing, and child molestations going down when child pornography is legal. As it was briefly in Sweden and Denmark when they took down obscenity laws. So we can all be thankful that the internet makes all things available to everyone now regardless of the wishes of authoritarians.

Violent movies (unlike first person shooters) don't actually train people to become better criminals, they just satisfy criminal appetites. Satisfied criminal appetites don't bloom into criminal activity. All the academics masturbating about how this "whets criminal appetites" can shove their scholastic number-of-angels-on-a-pin lying crap "arguments" up their ass.

Let's not forget these are the same psych- social- academic numbnuts that came up with the cathartic "letting out your aggression" theory without ever checking whether it works. It doesn't! All "catharsis" does is it lowers the psychological barriers to violent action.

It's funny how catharsis is supposed to be good for potential victims or "mild" aggressors (with whom it's okay to sympathize) but satisfying appetites is bad for potential perpetrators. The truth is that acting anything out is bad because it trains you, but watching it done is okay. Huh, acting and watching are different, and victim vs perpetrator doesn't matter, who could have guessed? Just about everybody with a brain.

Going on, child abuse has also declined markedly across the board to the point where spanking children is frowned upon in most of the civilized world and illegal in the most advanced countries. Similarly, homicide and suicide are down thanks to the much reduced naked obedience to authority that's the product of the 1968 revolution.

That's another thing, the 1968 revolution. Holy fucking shit. Anyone who doesn't know it and claims to know human beings or society is an idiot. The same goes for anyone who underestimates it.

So yeah, the notion of human nature remaining constant, let alone being universal, is such an appalling and unbelievable load of anti-human crap. What it's basically saying (falsely) is that we're all doomed to be Nazis forever. That is a hateful fucking lie. Hell, not even Americans could ever be Nazis. It's just not true that Americans are as psychologically backwards and primitive as the average African.

And yet, anthropologists really believe this hateful lying shit. Because of course they detest their own societies and are in love with the "noble savage". Ugh. Just one more reason to execute the anthropology departments and incinerate their accumulated "work" before starting from scratch using physicists. Even restarting with psychologists would be an enormous improvement. That's really saying something.

Why Dune Can't Be Turned Into A Movie

I don't even remember how I got on a Dune kick right now. There are so many awesome lines, visuals and concepts in that movie. And yes I am talking about the movie you book snobs. What I do remember since it only happened 20 minutes ago is how I realized that Dune can never ever be turned into a movie.

I was reading about the making of the film and how David Lynch disowned the extended and narrated version of the film, the one that tried to fix the 'minor problem' of his original version being completely incomprehensible. That was when I realized of course it's incomprehensible, there's so many important new concepts in the movie!

Fluffier Than Helium

I will illustrate by comparing Dune to Star Wars. Star Wars has no background because it was never adapted from a book. This is what Star Wars boils down to:

• a hick Farmboy
• finds out he has Generic Psionics
• so a Complete Stranger decides to mentor Farmboy
• into an order of Psionic Paladins
• meanwhile, some Captured Princess sends a message
• to Mentor who takes his toys (robots and sword) and Protégé
• and they escape some Mooks to go to Princess' Prison
• where Mentor attacks Evil Paladin
• and while Mentor disappears
• Farmboy manages to free Princess
• Princess has blueprints of a Superweapon
• they attack Superweapon with air fighters launched from an ocean navy carrier
• Farmboy uses Psionics to destroy it

That's it. That's the entire movie right there, including all characters and all plot elements. Oh I've forgotten something? Some cherished little crap detail? That's because it's irrelevant. Once you comprehend those 13 points of the movie, none of which are remotely original, you've understood the entire movie.

And don't give me any crap about how Evil Paladin was Farmboy's father or how Generic Psionics is really psi+magic (ooh, magic lightning!) because that was all retconned. Even worse with Farmboy & Princess supposedly being siblings. It didn't stop Farmboy from putting the moves on Princess by the end of the movie, did it?

Denser Than Uranium

Dune is ... different. Here are the points you need to understand before you watch the movie:

• there's an ancient feudal space empire ruled by the Emperor
• House Atreides, House Harkonnen are major power brokers and enemies
• AI are forbidden as a matter of law and religious fiat
• humans have acquired super-human mental powers through drugs and training
• the Bene Gesserit have been running a multi-millenia breeding program to create a Physical God
• the Bene Gesserits have (known) powers of hypnotic voice, transmutation, and genetic memory
• Lord Atreides has a Bene Gesserit wife who is a central part of the breeding program
• Lord Atreides has a son with his wife
• the Spacing Guild controls all space travel
• they require Spice to fold space to achieve instantaneous travel
• the Spice extends Life, the Spice expands Awareness of both present and future
• a briefcase full of Spice is worth the price of a planet
• it can only be mined on a single planet in the Known Universe
• the planet Dune makes Hell look safe and comfortable
• the Emperor has decided to knock Atreides and Harkonen down a few pegs by setting them against each other

Not only are there more characters and plot elements before you can even watch Dune than there are throughout the entire Star Wars movie, but the least original of them is more original than the most original Star Wars element. Not like you need much originality to beat 'anonymous farmboy' or 'anonymous cheddar monk' or 'anonymous princess'. Hell, two of the "characters" are subservient robots. Tools!

But let's be fair, the least original elements of Dune I've listed are 'ancient feudal space empire' and 'the Emperor sets up two Houses against each other'. On the other side, the only original element of Star Wars is 'Princess has blueprints of Superweapon'. And that's only original for its time because nowadays there's nothing novel about Action Girls. In contrast, Machiavellian Emperors are a really old idea that's become novel again because few people are familiar with how monarchs reigned.

STILL Not Fully Comprehensible

The very first scene is Princess Irulan narrating. Why her? Why does she get screen time? It's because she's single, of marriagable age, and Paul Atreides marries her to legitimize his hold on power. Oh yeah, that didn't quite make it into the movie, did it? Yet you can't fully understand the first scene of the movie without knowing something they couldn't fit into the movie at all.

Why does Doctor Yueh betray Lord Atreides? Why is he even in a position to betray Lord Atreides? He's just a fucking doctor for fuck's sake! Oh it's because he's been conditioned as part of the Emperor's elite corps of incorruptibles. But it turns out he has been corrupted by the Baron Harkonnen who is holding Yueh's wife hostage. In fact, he's the first case of an incorruptible having been corrupted. None of that made it into the movie either.

And I haven't even mentioned the Sandworms. Or the Great Convention against atomics in the Landsraad. Or shields. Or lasguns' notoriously bad interaction with shields. Or Alia. Or Other Memories. Or Mentats. Or stillsuits. These are not irrelevant details. An irrelevant detail is how Lord Atreides' wife was the illegitimate daughter of Baron Harkonnen (showing the power of the Bene Gesserit to arrange this), or how the House Corrino heir was another Bene Gesserit candidate for Physical God. Those are irrelevant.

Science Fiction vs Fantasy

Dune has lots of deeply relevant intricacies because like any great science-fiction it aspires to a modicum of self-consistency and a lot of creativity. The SF stories that adapt best to movies are short stories like Total Recall and Minority Report. I'm not even counting anything remotely like Star Wars because those aren't science-fiction, they're space fantasies.

When you adapt SF novels, there's always too much material so you end up having to sacrifice something. Blade Runner sacrificed all the action - it's unrecognizable from the book, and the author considered the movie to complement the book. And Solaris sacrificed the themes - Stanislaw Lem was pretty disappointed that all his themes of Incomprehensibly Alien Aliens were pushed aside. I can't even imagine how Gateway or Foundation would have to be cut to be put in movie form.

Some people like to point out that fantasy novels like Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter have been made into movies. Isn't Dune better? Doesn't it deserve to be made a movie at least as much as that fantasy dreck? No, no it does not. Dune isn't better, it's monumentally better. Fantasy is inherently recycling of themes, characters and plot elements everyone is already familiar with. Do you think Tolkien invented elves, dwarves, dragons and evil gods? Like fuck he did. He just described landscapes and obsessed with naming everything. A name isn't an idea!

In great science-fiction there is nothing recycled. The novel Dune now more than 40 years after its first publication is still entirely original. You can't do such a novel justice with a couple of movies or even a mini-series. Even if you stuck to just the first book like the twits who made Dune (2000) failed to do, it just isn't long enough.

How To Do Dune Justice

To do Dune justice you'd need a full 13-episode series around just the first book. The battle when the Harkonnen and Sardaukar re-invade Dune, killing all the Atreides, leaving Paul and Jessica to flee into the desert? That would be 2 episodes right there, minimum.

The Atreides setting up on Dune, introducing the basic ecology & economy and Paul getting odd messages from the locals, that's at least one episode. The Emperor deciding to set up Houses Atreides and Harkonnen? That's an episode.

There would need to be one episode dedicated solely to the vital importance of the spice - maybe some smuggler tries to get off-planet with a briefcase full of the stuff. In the last scene of that episode, you'd probably see the smuggler executed and his stash confiscated only to follow it as it's re-sold through official channels until it ends up in a Space Guild Navigator's tank.

There would have to be an episode set before the movie to explain Jessica's background and to explain the Bene Gesserits. You'd need to come up with a storyline, probably involving some minor political intrigue at the Emperor's court. The episode wouldn't be about the Bene Gesserit, it would just involve them somehow, maybe only as secondary characters.

That's the thing, not only would most of the scenes in Dune end up being episodes of the series, but most of the episodes would be about things that aren't in the book, their central characters not even in the book. The book would just be the over-arching plotline of the series. So the 3 hour long movie would be stretched to 13 hours. And I repeat, minimum.

Babylon 5 achieved more starting with much sparser and poorer source material.

GDP projections: mindlessly drawing lines on a chart

In Brian Wang's latest mindless China boosting he claims that China's economic growth will continue at high tempo for at least another two decades. He doesn't base this claim, a claim on which all his projections depend, on any facts, he just assumes it to be true.

In fact, he's made clear in a previous post on the topic that he thinks losing 2 percentage points of growth over the coming decades is a worst-case scenario which he can't even imagine any reason for. This is because he is a fucking retard.

How Brian Wang Thinks (and I use the term loosely)

Nevermind that he misuses the word 'synthesis' to mean 'logical deduction' and 'collating of disparate facts', neither of which has anything at all to do with anything done by an artist, designer or philosopher.

I find that incredibly offensive but it's relevant here because it tells us where and how he got his notions from. He got them from economists, those notorious line drawers who understand fuck-all about reality, nothing about science, and less than nothing about any real-world economies.

For fuck's sake, economists think money and banking are what make up economies. And they dismiss the real-world economic behaviour of real human beings as "irrational" and "not economics". Their pretentious "economic models" are just some kludged up math equations stolen from 18th century thermodynamics. Not modern thermodynamics but strictly 18th century notions of thermodynamics which were quickly proven very wrong.

What Brian Wang's done is poll what economists (those empty-headed morons) say about China's economy and then copied their technique of mindlessly drawing lines (well "curves" because that way you can be more pretentious and mathemagical) on a graph. I'll prove it.

China's Demographics

China's GDP growth in the last 35 years has depended on uneducated peasants migrating to cities to become factory workers. This is called Urbanization. In the last 35 years, China's urban population has risen from roughly 160 million to 600 million. I say roughly since China is notorious for lying about these statistics much the way every Western government lies about unemployment figures.

So (600-160)/160 = 2.75. Over a period of 35 years, China's economy has more than doubled just from Urbanization alone. In fact, since 1.029^35 = 2.71, over 2.9 percentage points of China's economic growth over that 35 year period is attributable to urbanization alone. Assuming the uneducated peasants don't participate in the economy at all. A ridiculous assumption but hardly unprecedented in economic circles.

Is Urbanization in China going to continue? Yes but at a much reduced rate. In the last 35 years, China's urban population nearly tripled. In the next 20 years it's projected (lines have been drawn on a graph) to increase by 50%. That's 1.02^20 = 1.485. So that's 1.029-1.020 = 0.9 percentage points knocked out right there.

If you do away with the ridiculous assumption that uneducated peasants don't participate in the economy, things don't look so bad. But you still have to account for the fact that China's population increased by more than half in the past 35 years. Those uneducated peasants have to eat you know. And China's population is only projected to increase by 10% before it peaks within 20 years. Since 1.012^35 = 1.518 and 1.005^20 = 1.105, that's 0.7 percentage points knocked out right there.

Now, I'm not going to add 0.9 and 0.7 together to get 1.6, that would be double counting. But it's obvious China will lose at least 1 percentage point from the greatly reduced population and urban worker growth rates. That's in the very best case scenario. As I said before, Brian Wang thinks this is a worst-case scenario. His worst-case scenario takes into account only demographic change and nothing else.

Beyond Demographics - now we're talking real economics

Because of course, projections of China's economic future get worse the more factors you take into account. Back in 1981, China implemented this thing called the Responsibility System which means that farmers and company managers were responsible for losses and profits of their production. As expected, this provided a massive economic boost. Is this something China is likely to be able to repeat? No it is not. It's something China will never be able to repeat.

(Except by moving to an anti-authoritarian coop workplace system, but that would cause China's authoritarian regime some rather large political problems.)

It gets worse. Because you see, for the last 10 years China has been busily assimilating any and all high technology in the world, including but not limited to semiconductors, high speed trains, nuclear power plants, supercritical coal power plants, rocketry, automobile construction, marine ship construction. In fact, China is considering building nuclear container ships and is on the verge of becoming independent in nuclear power plants. Not bad for a country that still had a steam locomotive in regular service less than 5 years ago.

Can China reproduce its past assimilation of new technologies by copying starship Jumpspace engines and asteroid mining technology from the Centauri and Vorlon empires? No because they are fucking fictional. The best that China can hope for is to roll out the technology it's already acquired more widely. By say replacing inefficient coal power plants with more efficient ones. Oh right, it's already been doing that for the last 10 years. And yes, it will keep doing that ... with progressively smaller returns on investment.

And then it gets much worse. You see, there is another country that pursued the same export-oriented labour-intensive then shift to high-tech long-term economic strategy that China is now pursuing. It's not like China invented the idea after all. It's a tried and true pattern. Well, that country is South Korea. As it happens, South Korea never managed to achieve the phenomenal growth rates China did and its long-term average in its best growth phase was at least 3 percentage points lower than China's.

Does that mean China has got some kind of special magic going? No, because I'm not the kind of dumbass that believes in magic. Nor am I a racist that believes, as Wang certainly does, that Chinese are naturally superior.

What it means is that China has been using its raw economic clout to ... um 'acquire' high technology from every other country in the world. Something South Korea never managed. Not for free anyways - South Korea paid for the technology it acquired. China just demands it as a cost of doing business. But as already noted, there isn't anymore technology left for China to hustle from other countries. It's already got everything, including things like maglev that nobody else is using.

The only other possible explanations are 1) China's economic growth going in had been suppressed in a way South Korea's hadn't been (unlikely), 2) China went into its growth phase with more educated and healthier people (it did thanks to starting growth 20 years late), 3) having a communist government really does help (yes but not when the capitalists are playing smart industrialist), 4) China is fudging its economic figures. Personally, I'm banking on #2 and #0 (health and technology) but what's interesting is that none of the explanations for higher-than-south-korea growth rates are sustainable. In fact, health-wise China isn't doing too well lately compared to South Korea.

Even the very worst of economists (supposedly) understand the difference between intensive economic growth and extensive economic growth. China is currently in an extensive economic growth phase where it's putting already-existing (labour) resources to work. And long, long before it hits Western levels of per-capita GDP it will have moved to an intensive economic growth phase. By which I mean that its economic growth will crash.

South Korea

I want to finish this by getting back to South Korea, especially the part where I said "and then it gets much worse". South Korea isn't a line on a graph that exists only in some moron's imagination. It's a real country with a real (industrial) economy - not a fictional economy like the USA's, Ireland's, Iceland's or China's recent property bubbles. And South Korea is roughly 20 years ahead of China so what's happened in the last 20 years to South Korea is rather instructive to anyone who wants to predict China's future.

Now, South Korea's highest growth phase occurred in the 60s and 70s, back when the world economy was still booming and not in chronic depression since the likes of Reagan, Thatcher, Kohl and Gorbachev (all horrible leaders in their own unique ways). What happened to South Korea in the 2000s doesn't make things look very promising. Worse yet, South Korea is extremely urbanized, so it's not going to grow that way anymore. I suppose that's good news for China since it's going to be urbanizing well into the latter half of this century. But really it just means that China is backwards and it's going to be dealing with uneducated peasants that much longer.

There is something incredibly fishy in China's economic figures. It doesn't make any sense at all that China could sustain a higher economic growth rate than South Korea's while ending up with a poorer real-world outcome. China was about 20 years behind South Korea when they began their respective economic growth phases, and it remains more than 20 years behind South Korea today. And this despite having better demographics, better health and better access to technology. It's probably due to China's bloated foreign-exchange reserves which are 2.5 times larger than South Korea's on a GDP per capita basis. Clearly China's government has fucked over its own citizens and the world in order to acquire global financial power.

And with that last insight, maybe China can afford to prop up its economic growth rates. Assuming it's willing to lose most of its financial power.

An Open Rant To Brian Wang, the Mindless Chink Booster and Preacher

A personal response prompted by http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/10/nuclear-fission-nuclear-fusion.html since the bastard has a habit of deleting negative responses on his blog. Yes, I took great umbrage to his "we will triumph through the power of our ignorance" stance on FTL at one point, as I think any sane person must.

Rant Begins

It's amazing how stupid you still are about space, hyping up blatantly un-feasible systems like fusion and antimatter and totally neglecting awesome, kickass and entirely practical systems like Isaac Kuo's x-ray laser drivers.

Why? Because they don't fit into your Star Trek future where you have tramp freighter captains that can ram a starship right into our planet with us having no defenses. What's your solution to that problem? Ignore it and pray to the Machine God that everything will work out okay. Meanwhile, preach resignation and futility! You're such a fucking dumbass it's incredible. Like some kind of crazy UFO / suicide cult leader.

It's amazing how stupid you are to confuse Hawking saying "not impossible in theory" with "feasible engineering-wise". You call yourself an engineer? Fucking pathetic. The Fermi Paradox proves that faster than light travel may be "possible in theory" all you want, but it can never, ever be feasible in any kind of engineering sense. Not even if FTL required as little as the power of a supernova. Because if it were so feasible then some alien civilization would have colonized this galaxy in the past 12.3 billion years. 

But when basic logic conflicts with your hype, your hype wins.

You do the same thing with Lunar Development. You claim that helium-3 is a valid reason to go to the moon. Bullshit! Mining helium-3 would cost billions a tonne. Yet the stuff is only worth 100,000$ a tonne if it's to be competitive with fission fuel. So you would be taking a loss of greater than 99% with Helium-3 or having a return on investment of -99.999%. Congrats retard.

Lunar development is one of your pet projects so you use fusion power to justify it. Fusion power is one of your pet projects so you use lunar development to justify it. Yet you're too fucking stupid to realize your logic is circular. And you're way too stupid to realize that of these two projects neither is economical. What kind of a fucking engineer are you?!

And while I'm at it, you've also never once mentioned that putting domes over cities would cut out rain which would make the cities involved filthy and increase their cleaning costs. You've reprinted that story at least three times with ever more elaboration and you've never once mentioned the obvious. Don't you have any fucking common sense?

How can you expect to be convincing when you totally fail to mention anything negative even when it's blatantly fucking obvious to absolutely everyone?! Just hope people are stupid enough to not notice it, is that it? Just hope they're not wondering and suspicious about the costs of artificially cleaning a city?

And for anyone wondering at the title, it's because Brian Wang is a Chinese racist and it shows. And just as his mindless boosterism can be aggravating when it falls afoul of common sense, fundamental physics or elemental logic, yes his racism and mindless China boosting is aggravating too. The only thing worse than boosting backwards, uneducated and psychologically un-evolved people like the Chinese is the even worse Indians. The Germans are bad enough, and they're the best there is in western Europe. China? You're talking about at least three notches lower.

What's the point of Buffy the Vampire Slayer?

Looking for pictures of Earthrise over the moon, I ran across this comment by a refreshingly non-brainwashed person:

> So I know that Buffy has always been known as a show that has a lot of depth, and responds well to analysis, but I just wasn’t able to see it in the episode we watched in class.

> I have several friends who are die-hard Buffy fans, and I’ve always heard of it in relation to its exploration of gender issues. However, when I saw the episode in class (my first), I didn’t really get it. I mean sure, it has a badass female protagonist who can stand up for herself, but so do plenty of other things. Maybe its just because the show is 13 years old, but I don’t see what it did that was so special.

Here's my answer to that question.

The point about Buffy is that a girl can be a brainless ditz and even an abusive bitch yet still be lauded as a great leader. The more she moans, complains and whines, the more heroic she is. The great "gender reversal" of the show is that women can assault and rape their significant others and get away with it scot free, because it shows they're "strong". Just as strong as men!

[Of course, the REAL point about Buffy is that Joss Whedon's got a peculiar sexual fetish for young strong bitchy girls who show naked feet which he's managed to broadcast all over television. But I doubt you want to think about that so let's pretend it's purely political. And speaking of politics,]

In a word, it's misandry. Something that's become disgustingly common in the last few decades when women suddenly decided they wanted an equal share of modern technological society despite not having contributed a single iota to the advance of science, technology, or industry in the entire 100,000 years the human species has been alive. For instance, obstetrics didn't start progressing until men got involved in it - not a coincidence.

In fact, women don't have the slightest clue what they're good for besides pumping out babies so now that we don't really care (or want) to pump babies anymore, they've suddenly (it's a coincidence!) decided they've been the victims of oppression by males in every single society on Earth for the last 10,000+ years. As proof consider that a minority of murder victims are women - in a just world only men would ever die or drop out of school or suffer in any way. Since men acceding to women's desires to not accomplish anything in public life obviously makes women victims, their victim status entitles them to victimize in turn. An eye for an eye, that's fair right?

The reason women don't know what they're good for isn't because they're good for nothing, it's because they're stupid so they can't figure it out themselves. I'm going to give away the secret here though: women are responsible for all the psychological advances which permit and encourage the existence of modern civilization. There's quite a bit of difference between the medieval societies of Pakistan or India which have nukes and the 19th century French who didn't. The French were vastly more socially and psychologically advanced, that's what. A mere century ago, India still practiced infanticide - think about that.

Of course, the feminazis don't like to dwell on that because all that psychological advance is tied to having babies and raising children. Something they don't want. And it's no coincidence at all that they're ugly (google Andrea Dworkin if you want nightmares) or lesbians. I mean, it's not like more than 99% of 19th and early 20th century feminists were lesbians. I'm sure it was no greater than 90%. And I'm sure the percentage of lesbians has gone way down now they've accepted ugly fat man-hating bitches into their ranks.

Yes, I have a bit of a problem with anyone buying into the notion of "let's undermine the progressive half of the population out of spite, bitterness and sour grapes". Sue me.

I have an even bigger problem with the fact that according to statistics there is one third as many women who are my intellectual equals as men. How the fuck are you supposed to find a significant other who's your match in those circumstances? Yes I'm bitter, but I don't want to wreck the world because of it.

Fusion Will NEVER Be Viable

I've never been interested in fusion because I knew it wouldn't be viable for at least 50 years. Why bother worrying or hyping about it when it's crap? Well, I just did a spot of research into it and what I've found is simply amazing.

The main line of research is crap because the fuel they need to use (tritium) would cost millions per kilogram. This compares extremely poorly to uranium which can be had for less than 100$ per kg. Even extracting uranium from seawater costs less than 1000$ per kilogram.

Note that there isn't much conversion needed since all proposed fusion processes produce energy per kilogram of fuel at rates roughly equivalent to fission of uranium.

Let's not forget the fact that D-T fusion produces 30 times (*) the amount of neutron radiation per kilogram as uranium fission. Neutron radiation is the kind that causes things to become radioactive. I hope you love nuclear waste because D-T fusion makes fission look waste-free.

The yo-yos who want to go to the moon to mine Helium-3 say crap like "that 25-tonne load of He3 would worth on the order of $75 billion today, or $3 billion per tonne". Of course, this is a blatant lie. Helium-3 isn't worth $3 billion per tonne, it costs $3 billion per tonne. What it's actually worth if you're using it as fuel in a fusion power plant is less than $50,000 per tonne, or 60,000 times less than they're claiming.

This doesn't mean that helium-3 mining can't happen economically. It just can't happen with chemical rockets. You need nuclear (fission) rockets to get to the moon and mine that helium-3 economically. And I'm really assuming here that it'll be economical, but if you're going to be using nuclear fission rockets, if nuclear fission has gained that much political and social respectability, then why bother with a fusion reactor at all?

Why harness the power of a twinkling little star when you can harness the power of a supernova? That's where all Uranium comes from, from the r-process running up the neutron drip line, from the blazing heart of an exploding stellar super-giant. The hype around fusion defies comprehension even as mindless sun worship. Don't people realize our sun is nothing, nothing, compared to something that outshines a galaxy. It's like wishing to cuddle up to a candle when you have a roaring bonfire next to you.

But that's not where the fun ends with fusion research. You see, there's an "alternative" line of research which advertises being able to use everyday normal crap like Borax (boron) and that its reactors will be so cheap they could be built in someone's garage ....

Well problem is they can only do that if the fuel is totally pure. Boron must be purified from 80% to >99.7%, otherwise those dippy little reactors built in people's garages will kill everybody near them. The best part is that even though Borax costs $2 per kilo, pure boron costs around $5000-10,000 per kilogram depending on its purity. And you want to use that for fuel? Yeah, that's not going to happen. Don't expect any economies of scale either since industry is already making the stuff in massive quantities.

But the fun doesn't end there. You see, pure boron in fusion reactors wouldn't cut it. No siree, you need pure boron-11. Because if you shoved any boron-10 (which is 20% of natural boron) into your garage-built fusion reactor, it would ... kill everyone around it. What you really want is pure boron-11 and as it happens we do have plenty of boron-11 around since boron-10 is used as a neutron radiation absorbent by ... the nuclear fission industry.

So you see, it's beautiful. It really is. If you try to build fusion reactors to replace fission reactors then those fusion reactors won't have any fuel. The only way we'd ever have little fusion reactors in people's garages is if we have giant fission plants in every city.

*: deuterium (2 nucleons) + tritium (3 nucleons) -> helium-4 (4 nucleons) + 1 neutron for 20% of mass. In comparison, uranium (235 nucleons) + neutron -> a smorgasbord of stuff + 2.5 neutrons on average, for a net production of 1.5 neutrons (0.6% of mass) on average.

Commercial Use Of A Stargate

I always thought the Stargate in the show was ludicrously underutilized. They don't use it for anything!

First of all, we would never ever tie up the Earth's Stargate by running a military exploration program through it. Hell, it's not even remotely secure. We'd establish a military base off-world and run the entire exploration program through that. That way nobody would really care if the military base had to use the nuclear self-destruct option. Hmm too bad, we'll need to build a new base.

Opening the Choke

Secondly, the Earth's Stargate would be dedicated to colonization and resource (wood, iron, petrol, grain, and fish) transport. And the way you would run the Stargate is not using trains or cars or pedestrians, which would be immensely stupid. Rather you would place the gate horizontally so that gravity helped you drop things into the sending gate and out of the receiving gate.

Check this out.

(((pi * ((3 m)^2)) * (10 m)) per second) * (1 year) = 8.92251061 × 10^9 m^3

That's 9 billion cubic meters that can flow through the Stargate each and every year. And that's on slow speed because all you have to do is set up a funnel on the sending gate shaped in such a way that what's falling through is in free fall for one second.

In order to maintain a steady flow through the funnel, you'd set up the gate so it was movable, so you would move it away from the funnel as soon as it shut down so you could restart it. That way the kawoosh doesn't disintegrate part of the stream of goods you're trying to send. Then when it's online you slide it right back into the stream of (wood, iron, petrol, grain, and fish).

Changing Land Usage

To grasp what impact this would have on Earth, consider the world annual fish production of 120 million tonnes. It would take ((120 million tonnes) / ((721 kg) per (cubic meter))) / (9 billion (cubic meters)) = 0.018492834 (1.8%) of the Stargate's capacity to pass this through.

The world's telecommunications companies would rejoice since they would no longer have to put up with asshole fishermen cutting their (meticulously mapped) expensive fiber optic cables. And it would be much easier to regulate off-world fisheries to prevent destruction of seabeds since they would be utterly dependent on the Stargate to get fishing boats and nets off-world, and their catch to market.

Or consider the world annual roundwood production of 3.3 billion cubic meters in 2003. That wouldn't take up half of the Stargate's capacity. That's right, we could more or less end all forestry on Earth if we had a Stargate and didn't waste it like the dumbfucks at Stargate Command. And as a bonus, only the very best hardwoods would be harvested and sent through. But they would still be cheap.

Or consider the world's total cereal production of 2000 million tonnes. So (2000 million tonnes) / ((770 kg) per (cubic meter)) = 2.5974026 × 10^9 m^3. That wouldn't take up a third of the capacity.

When you add it all up, there's still plenty of room for the world's iron ore production (1.7 billion metric tonnes) / ((2500 kg) per (cubic meter)) = 680 million m^3.

Within 5 years you would displace 90% of the agricultural land usage on Earth, leaving the Earth's agricultural land for non-transportable fruits, vegetables and nuts. Hmm, nuts are transportable ... There would be massive reforesting.

And why would you do this? Well, maybe to capture some of the over one trillion euros per year that would be flowing through the Stargate. And that's at slow speed.

Passengers

You'd think that passengers would be different. Well, they're not. Oh you can do things the dumb way by constructing custom trains and rolling them through the Stargate at a tempo of 40 per hour. That might get you up to 700 million trips per year. That would be dumb. And at 1000 euro per trip, that's only 700 billion per year of revenue. At 10,000 per passenger-seat, you won't find many takers.

But like I said, that would be dumb. The right way to send passengers through the Stargate is to fluidize them. Or better yet, to think of them as logs. Your job is to dump them vertically with the smallest cross-section possible through the Stargate and then into a lake of water. So it's wet suits and mini air respirators for the passengers. On the other hand, you achieve a throughput of

(pi*(300 cm radius of stargate)^2 / (pi*(50 cm width of shoulders of average man)^2 ) * 90% (the packing efficiency of circles on a plane) per second * 1 year = 4 billion trips per year.

Note that the receiving Stargates can be on any off-Earth planet. Because once you're off-Earth, efficiency no longer matters and you can just walk through your local gate to your final destination. You just need to make sure that Earth doesn't send all the passengers to a single planet - dividing them among 10 planets ought to do it.

Tubes

So the way you fluidize passengers is you build a tube system. At each Stargate you build 127 tubes going into or out of each Stargate. Each tube starts at a funnel which accepts standing passengers on little platforms. Once the passengers are in their wet suits and respirators and masks, they step on this little platform inside the funnel. Then when the Stargates are working and the tube systems are aligned, the passengers are dropped sequentially 1 pax per second into the tube. They're going pretty fast so they've got 8 meters of headway between them.

Inside the tube you're dragged along by the water and the air is steadily filtered out. Then your tube starts to turn around so that it joins up with all the other 126 tubes into this huge bundle. And it's this straight bundle of tubes that's aimed at the event horizon of the Stargate. So you shoot down through your tube for a minute or two then through the wormhole then into a precisely aligned tube on the receiving Stargate. At which point the tubes are unbundled, twisted around so all 127 are in a single row and everyone's dumped into a fast-flowing but deep river. An artificial river that's flowing through pipes drilled through a gently rising smooth rockface right in the river. So you get scooped along upwards onto bare rock and the water you're in gets sucked into the rock, leaving you high and dry.

And that's how you send 4 billion people a year through a 3 meter radius choke point. As a bonus, you're providing an exciting and novel experience that nets you a few trillion Euros a year, every year. If you only use 25% of the Stargate's transport capacity for passengers then you can still offer 1 billion trips per year (more than you could offer with custom trains using up 100% of capacity) while leaving enough capacity free to transport all of the wood, all of the fish, all of the iron, and all of the grain the Earth needs.

Richard Dawkins' Magical Gene

I figured out what pisses me off so much about Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. It's because he's a magical thinker and magical thinking is stamped right through his thesis.

Richard Dawkins thinks that individual strings of nucleotides in individual organisms compete against other strings of nucleotides in the same organism. He thinks these utterly mindless, thoughtless and passive strings of information are "selfish" and that they "seek to replicate themselves". He thinks these strings, no different from the string 0103202010102310001 have a will, have something that they want.

Of course, none of that is true. The big problem is that it's not even true as a metaphor. You see, Richard Dawkins thinks of genes as constrained within organisms. He thinks the string 0103202010102310001 in organism Dave Thompson has a magical essence which will get passed on to Dave Thompson's biological children, and maybe Dave Thompson's other cells in the case of genes that manage to duplicate themselves across chromosomes.

But that's all crap. The truth is that the string 0103202010102310001 in Dave Thompson has no magical essence, has no essence of any kind. It is exactly identical as the string 0103202010102310001 in Chen Xian Lue on the other side of planet. Exactly identical. So when you talk about genes, it's completely illogical to talk about "the gene 0103202010102310001 in Dave Thompson" or even "the individual gene in such and such organism". When you talk about genes, the MEANING of "the individual gene" is "all of the strings matching this in all of the organisms on the planet".

When you imagine an individual string of nucleotides in an organism, the correct way to think about it isn't that they are selfishly competing against all other strings of nucleotides. Because if you're going to drag in competition into this, you can equally say that each string of nucleotides is a fanatical cooperator with all other matching strings of nucleotides across every organism on the planet. At most you can only say that strings of nucleotides are competing against non-matching strings of nucleotides. And even that is only a metaphor.

Consider what would happen in an environment with 90% infant mortality if a gene guaranteed 90% survival at the cost of 10% of infants that would die because their entire DNA liquefied. Basically, consider what would happen if 10% of copies of a gene sacrificed themselves for the other 90%. They would be wildly successful!

Yet this little insight completely passed Richard Dawkins by. If Dawkins understood what genes are in the first place, he would never have entitled his oeuvre "the selfish gene" because "selfish" is hopelessly reductionist and inaccurate to describe something that is by its nature fanatically cooperative. Assuming it had a will at all, which it doesn't.

Richard Dawkins is a fairly mindless little freak who believes in magic. As biologists must be since Biology is fairly mindless & random and makes no sense at all. What is infuriating about him is that he got one thing right (that natural selection means genes compete against non-matching genes) and used this truth to push forth a much greater lie (that there are these things called genes contained inside you). And the lie is the exact opposite of the truth since genes aren't contained inside you. They're spread out across all organisms.

Fighting For Gay Rights Accomplished Nothing

I just took another glance at this comic about gay rights and political progress a friend of mine gave me. At the time, I said I didn't buy it because Americans can't turn to outright genocidal Nazism. That kind of thing requires a major childrearing change. The "banality of evil" is as much bullshit as all the pro-Gaia anti-human anti-industrialism garbage - it's the complete 180 degree opposite of the truth.

So what childrearing change has there been? Well, a big change produced the 1968 generation. And it's been 42 years since 1968 now. The 1968ers were > 15 years old, add 42 means they're now above 57. So basically, everyone now alive in modern countries either participated in 1968 or were parents of those who participated. Or like Sarkozy, were nutball fascists who wanted to counter-participate in 1968 but were grounded.

Another telling point is PACS (registered union) which is very popular in France. Introduced as an alternative to legalizing same sex marriage, it's a popular form of easy-in easy-out strictly consensual marriage lite. That kind of social arrangement would have been unimaginable to the 1950s ('no divorce, ever!') generation. Yet it was introduced as a sop, as something completely uncontroversial.

What do we learn from this? That none of the politicking and rallies and all that other crap mattered much. It was all going to happen anyways. All the "fighting" was the noisy vanguard of an inexorable tide of social change. The fighting for gay rights wasn't a cause of the acceptance of gay rights. It was an epiphenomenon, a mere side-effect of much deeper and more meaningful social change about all kinds of sexual freedom.

There's a lesson in this. And the lesson is that putting all of your effort, all of your energy, your entire life even, into fighting for something without any understanding or comprehension of social forces or social systems or psychology results precisely in you totally wasting your life. You can't change the world by putting your shoulder against a brick wall. You need to find the fulcrum point to stick your lever in.

You're never going to achieve any of your goals by being a mindless brainwashed grunt such as Greenpeace is so fond of. But a single guy like Robert McFarland in Boulder, Colorado can achieve a local revolution.

The Modern Physicist's Religion: The Big Bang

I hate it when otherwise sane-seeming physicists start spouting trash about the Big Bang. You can tell they're doing it by rote, that they're parroting some propaganda they've been indoctrinated with. Something they've never examined to see whether it makes a lick of sense.

NO EVIDENCE

First of all, there is no evidence for a Big Bang. There cannot ever be any evidence for it since the whole point of inventing Inflation Theory was to erase every last trace of the big bang to remedy the defects of the theory. The reason the Ekpyrotic model is viable at all is because of this total erasure of all traces of any big bang. But inflation? Oh you can't erase that! Even the Ekpyrotic model generally tries to replicate it. So what is today called "evidence for" the big bang is invariably evidence for hot inflation. Cosmic microwave background? Hot inflation. Expansion of the universe? Inflation.

MATHEMATICALLY IMPOSSIBLE

Secondly, you have to realize that there can be no distinction between inflation and eternal chaotic inflation. If inflation happens then eternal chaotic inflation is the best possible model for it. You get eternity for free. Read my lips, no extra charges! Add quantum mechanics to inflation theory and you get chaotic inflation. And with chaotic inflation you have eternal inflation. It's FREE!

Worse than that, our living in a finite universe is mathematically impossible. If the probability of a universe arising out of nothing (assuming the whole notion isn't absurd which it is, more on that later) is finite then the probability of our living in an infinite universe is infinite. Infinity trumps finity!

If there were only one single eternal universe, and a billion billion billion finite universes, we could never tell the difference between them from any scientific experiments, but pure mathematics says that the probability of us coming from the eternal universe is 1 and the probability of us coming from any of the billion billion billion finite universes is ZERO.

It's statistically impossible.

ABSURDITY

The whole notion of something arising out of nothing is absurd. It's incoherent. It literally doesn't mean anything. The only way to ascribe any meaning to it is to say that the universe as-is is equivalent to nothing.

Which is very likely since a flat universe (as ours seems to be) has net zero energy. But to say that it's equivalent to nothing is to say that 'nothing' is subject to physical laws. or at least to mathematical laws. So it's not a true 'nothing' is it? It's something, it's laws of mathematics.

In order to say that what's beyond the universe is true nothing, you can't appeal to any sort of equivalence, you can't say that the universe came out of nothing at all. You can only say that the universe created itself. And what can you appeal to when making such a statement?

Well actually you can say that the universe created itself because it was self-consistent. But if you're going to say that then there are tons of other self-consistent universes possible. And every single one of them must have created itself.

Bravo, you've got the Mathematical (Multi)verse Hypothesis. Which is the exact kind of thing the Big Bang believers are trying to avoid. In trying to provide any kind of rigorous meaning to "the universe came out of nothing" you inevitably run into the fact that our universe can't be the only thing.

You get the same result when you try to define "non-determinism". It literally doesn't mean anything. And when you try to give it some meaning, it always turns out to be inconsistent with the vague notion of "non-determinism".

REVERSION TO RELIGIOUS DOCTRINE

So if the Big Bang is unprovable, mathematically impossible and it's not even coherent then why do these big headed logical types believe in this utter crap? Well first of all, physicists lack big picture thinking. Also known as judgement, which relies on synthesis. And synthesis is a cognitive trait physicists uniformly lack. But that only explains why it's possible for physicists to believe this crap.

Why they actually believe in it is because it's a religious notion. It's a belief in Creation. It's something that people used to believe in until science became atheistic. Until four young scientists made a manifesto and signed it with their own blood. That's why Einstein was so adamantly opposed to the Big Bang. Because it's a religious notion which science had gotten rid of!

And really, that explains it all. When cosmologists were confronted with the fact of an expanding universe, they couldn't handle the notion that ours isn't the only universe out there. So they reverted to religion. They reinvented the "Big Bang" - the Moment of Creation.

The same thing happened in the 1920s with the so-called Copenhagen "interpretation" of quantum mechanics. Which is no interpretation at all - it's the physical theory behind a bunch of useless math. Physicists like Richard Feynman who dismiss the physical meaning of math as unimportant are lackwits. So anyways, Copenhagen would be the physical meaning of QM if it weren't completely absurd and incoherent.

So believers in the Copenhagen doctrine revived vitalism because they couldn't handle the idea of a non-singular timeline. They invented all kinds of crap about "duality" and "uncertainty" because they couldn't handle that Platonism is wrong, that the universe really isn't made up of mathematical points. Even though mathematical points are physically incoherent.

They reinvented the notion that humans and other living things (so-called "observers") are Special, that they have this fundamental Living Force that makes them different from the rest of physical reality. How absurd is that!? But it's something that humans believe intuitively. It's an anthropomorphic notion. And that's why it got reinvented.

Same thing with Creation, or the Big Bang, whatever you want to call it. It's an intuitive anthropomorphic ('we are special') notion that just got reinvented when scientists were challenged to shatter it utterly. They were challenged and they failed. Because they're morons who can't grasp the big picture. Who can't grasp that maybe "creation" is something that needs to be defined before it means anything. Before it can ever be used to explain anything.

Kinda like God. For God to explain anything, it first needs to be defined. Which defeats the whole purpose of it since God is supposed to be this mysterious incomprehensible ball of crap and handwavy bullshit. And bullshit can't explain jack.

Same with Creation. /shakes head/

Previously, the disease process in physics.

Dodging Asteroids at Lightspeed? You Fail Physics Forever

Okay, this rant is inspired by a story (which I won't recommend) that tried to one-up the standard "dodging asteroids" scene by having the spaceship (a small two-man fighter) do it at light speed. Seriously, for the love of all that's good, WHY? Apparently, because light speed is KEWL.

I think anyone reading this blog probably knows all of this but what the hell, I put several hours into this rant so I might as well put it in a convenient place. Who knows, maybe someone will find it useful to smash some ignoramus over the head.

VISIBILITY

First issue, visibility of destinations and obstacles. In the story, this carrier ship is supposed to be 8 kilometers long. If the fighter is traveling at lightspeed then one second away from the carrier, it's 1 light-second away. Well,

arctan((8 km) / (1 light-second)) in degrees = 0.00152894519 degrees

Do you know what that is? From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_eye

> Angular resolution: 1-2' (about 0.02°-0.03°), which corresponds to 30–60 cm at a 1 km distance

0.02 / 0.00152894519 = 13.

In other words, 1 second away from the carrier at lightspeed is still thirteen times too small to see with the naked eye.

Even assuming that Talking Is A Free Action and the protagonist was able to point out and describe the carrier to his passenger instantaneously, the passenger would still have been unable to see it.

In fact, since the human eye sees at about 18 frames per second, the passenger would just barely be able to see a tiny speck of white if he stared at the exact spot the carrier was going to pop up at in advance.

So first he would see nothing, then immediately after he would see a speck, then immediately after that he would see the entire ship.

KINETIC ENERGY

Going on, the author doesn't seem to have heard of this thing called "kinetic energy", whether the relativistic or the newtonian kind. Behold,

(((1 / 2) * ((0.9 * c)^2)) * 1 gram) / (1180 (kilojoules per gram)) = 30.8471057 tonnes

The top half of the left hand side of that equation is the kinetic energy of 1 gram of matter (say, space dust) travelling at a velocity of 90% the speed of light. The bottom half of the left hand side of the equation is the heat necessary to fuse lead starting from 0 degrees Kelvin (absolute zero). The right hand side is how much of your ship is going to melt away from a collision with 1 gram of space dust. Assuming nothing heats up that doesn't melt and blah blah blah.

(((1 / 2) * ((0.9 * c)^2)) * 1 gram) / (4637 (kilojoules per gram)) = 7.8498134 tonnes

This is the same equation but including heating from 0 degrees kelvin to fusion, past fusion to boiling, past boiling to ionization. In other words, this is how much of your starship is going to turn into pure plasma from a collision with 1 gram of space dust. It's straightforward to come up with similar equations for iron (steel) and uranium, but unnecessary.

The fact that air going at 90% of the speed of light has the oomph of a thermonuclear explosion is really useful when designing real starships because it means an air shield misted in front of your starship in its direction of travel can reduce asteroids down to free nuclei and anything smaller than that into subatomic particles.

Starship design hint: you can make your starship as long as you want without increasing its cross-section. So it can store any finite amount of air you might possibly need on your interstellar and/or intergalactic trip to vaporize everything in its way. Once vaporized (well, ionized actually) it's easy to sweep the debris out of the way with your magshield. Particle accelerators do that every day.

And lest you think that I'm exaggerating when talking about thermonuclear explosions,

(((1 / 2) * ((0.9 * c)^2)) * 1 kilogram) / (4.2 petajoules) = 8.66656779

a 1 kilogram mass going at 90% lightspeed has a yield of a cool 8.67 megatons.

(((1 / 2) * ((0.99 * c)^2)) * 1 kilogram) / (4.2 petajoules) = 10.486547

at 99% lightspeed, it clocks 10 megatons.

It took until 1954 for the United States to have a nuclear device with a yield more powerful than that.

The most powerful thermonuclear weapon ever tested in human history was the Tsar Bomba, which clocks at the equivalent of 5 kilograms of mass at 99% lightspeed.

Are you starting to get the picture? Hitting anything at lightspeed results in a big boom.

REACTION TIME - NAIVE

From http://pseudoastro.wordpress.com/2008/10/26/asteroid-belts-proximity-of-rocks-and-why-navigation-is-not-dangerous-sorry-han-solo/

> Even if we cut the size of asteroids in half again, and were interested in all asteroids larger than half a meter (1.5 ft) in size, then we have 8 times as many asteroids, but each one still has over 500 km2 all to itself, and even more space if we consider the vertical component.

Using the formula for the volume of a sphere, and given that half of (half a meter) diameter gives a radius of 1/4 meter, we have

(4 / 3) * pi * ((1 / 4)^3) = 0.0654498469 cc's.

Assuming it has the density of water, that's 0.686342898 megatons or 686 kilotons. More than 30 times the explosion at Nagasaki. In other words, that's some dangerous fucking asteroids. And they're an average of

sqrt(500 (km^2)) = 7.45871992 × 10-5 light-seconds apart.

In other words, the hotshot pilot protagonist has one ten thousandth of a second to dodge them.

The speed of nerve impulses in the human body is "up to 100 meters / second". In other words, the nerve impulses in the pilot's body have the time to travel a whole

((100 (meters per second)) / 7) * (10E-5 seconds) = 1.42857143 millimeters

yeah, one millimeter in the time he has to dodge an asteroid. Brilliant, are you feeling the gritty realism yet? I know I am!

DISTRIBUTION OF ASTEROIDS

Now you may have noticed that the sqrt(500 km^2) neglects the vertical dimension. But 65 cc's is still an enormously dangerous asteroid, and if you go down to 1 cc then you still have to worry about explosions on the scale of 10 kilotonnes. For comparison, the Hiroshima explosion was 15 kiloton. Now, 65 cc's is conveniently close to 64 cc's

64* 1 cc = 2^6 * 1 cc

which means that asteroids of that size are

8^6 = 262 144 times as numerous,

given that it's a power law of degree 3 (every time you 1/2 the size, you increase numbers by 2^3 = 8). And

(8^6) * sqrt(500 (km^2)) = 5 861 718.04 kilometers

That's the height of the asteroid belt that's compensated for by the fact we're neglecting any asteroids less than 65 cc's.

(8^2) * (8^6) * sqrt(500 (km^2)) = 375 149 954 kilometers

That's the height of the asteroid belt that's compensated for by the fact we're neglecting any asteroids with yields of less than about 1 kiloton when travelling at 99% the speed of light.

And we can stop there because 375 million kilometers is almost the RADIUS of the asteroid belt. And of course, explosions of less than 1 kiloton aren't a danger at all to a tiny two-man fighter.

CHANCE OF COLLISION

So yeah, anyway. Now that we've established we can use the 500 km^2 number as a simplifying assumption, this is the proportion of the area swept by a 2 meter wide spaceship going through 500 km^2

(2 m) / sqrt(500 (km^2)) = 8.94427191 × 10^-5

which is the same as the chance of hitting that speck of rock somewhere inside it. And this,

(1 million km) / sqrt(500 (km^2)) = 44 721.3595

is the number of such areas you travel through when going 1 million km (less than 1% of the radius of the asteroid belt) inside the asteroid belt. So logically, this

(1 - (8.94427191 × 10E-5))^44721 = 4.17433136 × 10^-18

is the probability that you will cross 44721 such areas without hitting anything. In three seconds going at light-speed.

Do you understand what 10^-18 is? It's one tenth of one millionth of one billionth of one percent. It's one billion billion to 1 odds against. I think your chances of surviving a point blank gunshot to the forehead are higher. How do you like them apples?

REACTION TIME - REVISITED

Now that we have a probability of a collision, some playing around with google shows that,

(1 - (8.94427191 × (10^(-5))))^7 749 = 0.500012276

and of course,

7749 * sqrt(500 (km^2)) = 0.577976206 light seconds

So every half-second, there's a 50/50 chance that you'll have to dodge something. If you can convert this to a Mean Time Between Failures (or tell me how to) then you'll know the average reaction time you have between any two dodge-or-die events. Whatever that number actually is, it's going to be close to half a second. And of course, your reaction time had better be much better than this if you want to live through a breezy five minute jaunt.

So yeah anyways. Dodging asteroids at lightspeed? You fail physics forever.


See also,

Atomic Rocket - http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/index.html -- includes technical info on everything up to and including time travel (more plausible than you might think, infinitely more plausible than FTL)

Bad Astronomy and Universe Today Forum - http://www.bautforum.com/ -- if there's any name in starship design I'd recommend it's Isaac Kuo - he does it with today's technology, not hypothetical future technology

Hint: starships don't travel through the solar system, let alone something as dirty as the asteroid belt. They avoid collisions because they're in space.

This review was sponsored by Google TM search engine and Google TM calculator.

The British

This is me so you know not to expect your everyday rant. But ever wonder how the British like to proclaim the superiority of their nation? That's so ludicrous. And at the same time, they whine that the only villains it's okay to bash on in Hollywood are English. Well, let's examine that.

The British are psychopaths. Literally, their national identity is the psychopath, exactly like the American national identity is the narcissist. They plundered and slaughtered their way around the world for centuries and are still proud of it. They exterminated whole nations of natives and they've oh so conveniently forgotten. They feel no guilt at all for anything they've done. Hell, even the Americans feel guilty about exterminating the Amerinds. So as fucked up, vile and evil as the Americans are, they're actually an improvement over the British!

And let's look at their filthy right-liberal / capitalist ideology. A dysfunctional psychopathic ideology that promotes traders and masters over people who produce anything and human beings. You'd think that industrial production would matter most in an economy since it's one of two key defining concepts of 'economy' (the other being consumption) but no. And they have the gall to claim they're a democracy. No wonder their country's so fucked up. No wonder all Anglophone countries are way more fucked up than even moderately advanced European countries like France. Britain, Australia (that bumfuck colony), Canada (Stephen Harper's fascists?) and of course Crazyland (aka America) itself.

But hold on, there's more. You see, there's the question of why they're so fucked up. A lesser person would leave it at their being fucked up, claim it's their "national identity" or whatever. Bollocks. Let's turn out heads to deMause's theory of childrearing modes. These modes are: Infanticidal, Abandoning, Ambivalent, Intrusive, Socializing, Helping. For some calibration, Canada is mainly in the Socializing mode. America is half and half stuck in the Intrusive and Socializing mode. Nazi Germany was in the very early Intrusive mode where they ruthlessly beat their children into blind obedience to parents. And then in the 1960s, Germany underwent a wondrous metamorphosis, going from early 4th to late 5th socializing. No wonder I love Germans. They fucking EVOLVED. In a single damned generation. They evolved more in 20 years than America evolved in 200 years.

So where does Britain fit into all this? I'm so glad you asked! Well let's take a look at some quintessential British children's literature you may be familiar with. In Harry Potter, the constant running theme is that the children are, yes abused but forget that for a moment, supposed to be exactly like their parents, follow in their footsteps and all that rot. In the Weasley's case, they're dominated by their verbally abusive mother. You know, they're chattel to their parents. Parental love is conditional on the children being Just Like Them.

The other example is Doctor Who, specifically Season 2 where Rose is sent away. The Doctor goes to all the trouble of reuniting Rose's family so he can fob her off on them. Touching eh? That season was full of the nauseating 'family matters more than anything' theme. But it's not just that. At the beginning of the two-parter that ends with Rose unwillingly stranded with her family, her mother Jackie complains about her daughter's travels. And her complaint isn't that they're unsafe but that her daughter will grow apart, become an alien in mentality, even if remaining homo sapiens in biology. Jackie Disapproves because her daughter's going to be Different from her. So let's strand Rose in an alternate universe without a time machine, problem solved!

Yeah you guessed it, well assuming you know the childrearing modes well enough, Britain is stuck squarely in the 4th childrearing mode where they beat children to Make Them Obey. The UK under Tony Blair had more than a hundred human rights condemnations by the European Court of Human Rights. Tony Blair actually formally defended child abuse to the European Court of Human Rights! What breathtaking evil. It's like fundie camps in the USA or even "gay therapy". Point is, the British consider their children to be their chattel property, theirs to use and abuse. And it's not likely to change so long as the British see themselves as #1. America stagnated for 200 years, Africa has stagnated in the infanticidal / abandoning / ambivalent modes for millenia. What Britain really needs is to be conquered. I'd almost wish the Germans did it except I love the Germans too much to put them through that. Think a little about how the USA imported slavery from black Africa and Nazis from post-War Germany and you'll see what I mean.

The best part is that the British think they're superior to the French, right? Oh man. Yeah right. Actually, I have precious little data on which to nail French parenting. What I know of it's pretty damned harsh. Verbal abuse, if not physical. Unreasonable expectations of children. But then I remembered the wonderful children's series Once Upon A Time on which I grew up. It taught a whole generation about human history, human biology, the age of exploration, age of invention, and more. And it ended on an odd note, a science-fiction future that was pure propaganda and social engineering. And that's important because the French really accept social engineering. They accept the needs of society (as exemplified by the State, and specifically Engineers) over the individual. And all of that verbal abuse and unreasonable expectations of children is aimed at meeting the needs of society, which puts the French squarely in the 5th Socializing mode of childrearing. And it makes sense, I'd just forgotten how harsh Benjamin Spock's dictates really were.

So yeah, Germany is late 5th, France is early 5th, and Britain is mmm let's call it late 4th. Bottom of the pack all the way baby! I mean hell, even the Chinese have managed 4th mode, and a couple centuries ago they were infanticidal. Gotta love those Chinese, they're evolving.

There Is No New Internet Economy

I was reflecting on an earlier blog post about Complex Systems where I point out that theoretically there are only information, physical, economic & political systems and nothing else. There are some subtleties involved in this since very small primitive economies look like political systems more than anything else. After you realize that resource acquisition isn't such a hardship in primitive people's daily lives, and that intangible characteristics (ie, status) play a heavy role in these systems, then it makes more sense that they are political rather than economic. And artificial systems like resource distribution in computers could go either way, depending on how they're designed. But that's not what I want to get into.

What I want to get into is all the people who've been talking about the New Economy. You know, with the internet and the infinite reproducibility of information. People who've been trying to answer 'once you take out the cost of reproduction as a dominant element of the system, what's left?'. Clay Shirky has written about it on his site. Michael Goldhaber has written about The Attention Economy on First Monday. And I even recall an article using Hollywood as an analogy for the "new economy". It's all well and good. Hell until now I considered these papers to be Very Insightful. Only it turns out they're not very insightful at all. There never was a new economy and there never will be. What's called the "new economy" is an old thing called politics. Let's examine that for a minute.

The key concepts of the "attention economy" are attention, credit, fame and celebrity. Certainly politics has its own key concepts; loyalty, betrayal, conflict and factions come to mind. And you might think those are separate but wait for it. You see, the key concepts of economics are production, consumption, cost, price and trade. What do they have to do with politics? Nothing, that's what. Whereas, if you bother to think about it, the key concepts of the "attention economy" are the underpinnings of political power. If you have people's attention then you can help redirect that attention to something else, including something you want them to do. And making people do things is politics. Credit, fame and celebrity all further one's political power.

So what about loyalty, betrayal and conflict? What do they have to do with attention, with the so-called "attention economy"? Well, 'attention economy == politics' wouldn't be a very good insight if we didn't learn something new from it. And after careful thought, loyalty and betrayal are merely higher order effects. They're phenomena that appear when systems of attention are high valued and tightly bound together. Eric Raymond's betrayal of Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation didn't involve money or laws or anything else of the kind. It involved pure attention. Just a very high-volume and high-grade form of attention since Unix programmers were showing loyalty by heralding Stallman as the messiah. Loyalty then is nothing but a form of highly consistent, high grade, long term attention. Betrayal is the hijacking or redirection of loyalty. It's attention all the way down.

There never was any new economy and never will be. Only a degraded form of politics that must inevitably bloom into its full form.

As a final note, I will say that the insight that an economy is about scarcity is not nearly so interesting once you realize it's implied by metacircularity. A metacircular system is one that's got a concept of self, an idea of what it values and of how it wants to be. This inevitably creates optimization and prioritization, what are called economics and politics. Also, the question of 'what do you want to do and be when you can do and be anything?' comes out of this naturally. It becomes an obvious extreme to the evolution of such systems - a trivial insight, not an important one. All this can be derived from metacircularity, a far more important phenomenon than mere politics or economics.

Metacircularity, especially consciousness, is a topic I've been meaning to write on for a while.

Hypnotizability

Hypnotism is an interesting phenomenon in the sense that it's something that I am utterly appalled at which others see as no big deal. Hypnotism is to me much like a multiple car pileup is to other people. What makes it even more app umm "interesting" is that its fans yammer on about how thinking you can resist hypnotism isn't the same thing as resisting hypnotism. And this is correct in a trivial way, but I'll show why it should be false.

The subjective experience of hypnotism is that you're 'going along' with the hypnotist's suggestions of your own free will. Not that your will is being overridden or any such childish nonsense. No, you're just "going along". Kinda like the torturers in Milgram's Obedience Experiment were "just going along" with the dictates of the emotionless researcher who was commanding them to torture someone, even past the point of inflicting lasting harm.

Now this is rather interesting because it means I'm totally immune to hypnotism. Not because I'm going to "resist" it or because "my will is too strong" or any crap like that. But for the simple reason that the whole process fucking appalls me. The reason I can resist a hypnotist is because I'm never going to sit on a hypnotist's couch. The whole notion of obeying someone without question appalls me. Hell, if given a few minutes to think about it, I don't even follow up on my own promises if the circumstances change to the point where they're a really bad idea. Not only do I decide things for myself but I decide again and again.

And given what this ties into, the horrific Obedience Experiment, we would live in a much better world if fewer people "went along" with others. If they just decided things for themselves. Perhaps the reason this is such a poor world is because they don't have the mental capacity to do this. After all, if people are incapable of realizing that this world sucks and is horrific, why should they realize that their torturing someone is wrong?

What Science Can Be Trusted

One of the things I collect is stories of science gone wrong. Respectable, and still respected, scientific experiments that are deeply flawed and/or outright faked. I'm not alone in this since Richard Feynman taught himself not how to read bubble chamber photographs but how other scientists systematically misread them.

My suspicion of scientists started very early on when my high school physics teacher told me personally about how some students at the University of Toronto tried to reproduce Millikan's oil drop experiment with modern equipment ... and couldn't. In fact, not only was that experiment faked because the "results" were cribbed from theoretical values, but the theoretical value Millikan copied from was WRONG. As if that weren't bad enough, later scientists copied his "results" even when their own were more accurate. After all, it's not like such a renowned and well-respected researcher would have been a bald-faced filthy liar, could it? That's why the "empirically measured" charge of the electron shows a steady progression from Millikan's value to the true value over time.

The other story of shenanigans among scientists that marked me very early on was this story of a biologist who tried to make a rat maze experiment. So far so good, right? I mean, there are thousands of the fucking things. Except that he was obsessed with doing it properly. He wanted to eliminate every possible source of error and confusion. After a dozen iterations, he ended up with this kind of super-maze that had all kinds of insulating soundproofing anti-vibration features. That's great right? WRONG. Because what he did was invalidate years, decades, of other people's research. And he didn't even get any results from it. All he did was establish how rat maze experiments should be run. Wait wait, the best part's to come because you see he never got published. Yeah that's right, you can do first-rate science that invalidates thousands of other peoples' work and it isn't publishable.

More recently there was this fairly widespread story of how lab rats were being made sick by being fed standard rat food. Cause the rat food was made from soybeans. And if you know anything about nutrition, and aren't a braindead hippie, then you know that filthy estrogen-filled shit's horrible for you. These guys were testing cancer drugs if I recall correctly. While I'm on it, do you know why drugs that cure cancer in lab rats don't do jack in humans? It's because lab rats are really, REALLY prone to cancer. Animals that aren't hopelessly inbred and thus have functioning immune systems generally don't get cancer and don't NEED the anti-cancer drugs that work on lab rats. Well as if this weren't bad enough, it turns out the rat food had something to do with giving rats cancer too. So this "promising" anti-cancer drug turned out to do jack once the rats were given actually healthy food. The best part is that the filthy soybean shit they were feeding the rats was the same shit everyone else was feeding their rats.

Then there's medical experiments in humans. Those are a fun a dozen. Let's take breast cancer. The earlier you treat breast cancer, the better chances you have of surviving. It proves that early detection and intervention works, don't it? Not so! Cause there's this oft-forgotten thing called spontaneous remission. That's where your own fucking body naturally fights cancer all by itself and beats it. Many of the women who are diagnosed as having early stage cancer would have beaten it anyways. Without any treatment at all!! But forget that, let's just spin it as painful OUCH diagnostics and $$$ expensive $$$ treatments working! There's money in it, who cares about the truth? Kinda like the oncologists PRIDE themselves on planning anti-cancer therapies so that a patient gains, statistically speaking, a mere few days of extra life. We all know that a couple extra days of life are worth tens of thousands of dollars in the pockets of oncologists as well as excruciating pain for patients, right?

But there's no experiments like psychology experiments. There's the executive monkey experiment where two monkeys get zapped based on the performance of one monkey. The results of the experiment showed that the executive monkey got more ulcers. This is good, right? I mean it proves that managers DESERVE their ski vacations and massage treatments for deciding other people's fates. And we all love the rich, right? Only problem is with this whole "performance" thing. Apparently the researchers decided to choose monkeys for the executive slot based on intelligence. I mean, you wouldn't want a dumb monkey there, they'd get zapped all the time and it would make the experiment run longer! Yeah, so apparently after that little confounding factor got taken out of the equation, it turns out that, surprise surprise, the helpless monkey's the one with the ulcers!

Then there are experiments on hairless monkeys. Everyone knows of the Stanford Prison Experiment, right? Same with Milgram's Obedience Experiment. You know, the two experiments where you draft volunteers who are willing to obey the orders of some anonymous researcher and then you make them do horrific stuff, and then you conclude that ALL PEOPLE, regardless of whether or not they volunteered for psych experiments, are slaves to authority and would commit atrocities! Un-fucking-believable. You can't make this shit up. For fuck's sake, the experiments wouldn't have been conclusive even if they'd DRAFTED psychology students into them. Why? Because psychology students are abnormal (highly empathetic and irrational, generally incapable of logic) so they are not statistically representative of the general population.

Then there's the Six Degrees of Separation experiment. You know, the one where this bozo sent thousands of letters to be hand-delivered to a destination. Letters, 99% of which never got to any destination, but let's ignore that and focus SOLELY on the successes and then draw conclusions about the planet from it! Never mind that it became immediately obvious that people were stratified by class and that letters whose origin and destination were separated by class would just never get there. Or that hey most of the letters never reached their destination. Yes, let's make positive conclusions from utter failures! Unbelievable.

You know, there are monkey experiments that are fairly trustworthy. There's the Chicken Wire Mother Monkey experiment which determined that comfort is more important than food for infants. Funny how comfort isn't listed as one of the "16 basic needs" of humans, even though it's been known for centuries at least that human infants deprived from touch DIE.

Then there's the experiment where a bunch of monkeys in a cage were conditioned to beat each other up based on some signal, then they were rotated until none of the original monkeys in the cage were left. But every time the signal was given, the monkeys still beat each other up.

There's a couple things that make these experiments trustworthy. The first is that you're not pre-selecting monkeys. You have a bunch of monkeys and you just do something to absolutely every one of them. The second thing is that you're not watching for anything complicated or subtle. You don't care whether the monkeys play the violin or even whether they push a button on time, only whether they eat or they beat each other up. The last thing is that you're not depending on the monkeys to use their huge brains to learn and do something complex, you're looking at strictly animal behaviour. Simple experiments testing for simple behaviour are pretty reliable. Complicated experiments and/or complex behaviour are unreliable, no matter how spectacular they appear to be.

So what science can be trusted? Can you really trust those huge over-complicated equations in superstring theory? Actually yes, because math is simple. Math looks complicated to your puny, puny brain, but it's actually hella simple to mathematicians because it's regular and predictable. Well what about those huge experiments with those enormous overgrown particle accelerators at CERN and Fermilab? Surely that's too complicated! Surprisingly not since conceptually those are just hollow tubes drawn into a circular shape with magnets spaced a precise distance apart. The engineering might be complicated but the design is extremely simple. And there are thousands of engineers on those projects making sure that every single detail works to spec. Best of all, there are also thousands of scientists on those projects checking every little detail of the theory, including each others' work.

You see, "complicated" doesn't mean expensive. On the contrary. An experiment with a hollow tube in the shape of a perfect circle that happens to be 10 kilometers in radius is SIMPLE. The fact that it's expensive just means there's gonna be thousands of scientists to oversee this incredibly simple experiment. That's great! And going the other direction, a cheap experiment with a single human being, or even a fucking rat, is incredibly complicated. Because biology is complicated, because brains, even animal brains, are fucking complicated. And usually those experiments only have a single quack overseeing them. So expensive & simple == good. While cheap & complicated == bad. Which when you really think about it is terribly obvious, but people aren't used to thinking that a rat is complicated so anything at all you do with a rat is a horribly complex experiment.

See also Most Great Science Is Fraudulent... and Modern Scholasticism.

Co-existence of Humans and AI

I just got a response by Elf Sternberg to an earlier post where I deride Eliezer Yudkowsky and his Friendly AI project. It's a big disappointment. Not only do I find out that Sternberg is grossly morally and ethically deficient but he accuses me of not understanding his stories. Accusing me of not understanding anything at all is an endeavour frought with peril given I score at the top of the range of synthesis and it's the dominant function of my brain. But let's set that aside for the moment and address his specific accusation that his stories are about the development of AI that want to keep humans around and that I somehow failed to "get" that.

Well the co-existence of humans and AI is all fine and dandy for scifi stories but let's face it, it's absurd. It's as absurd as technological alien civilizations in the Milky Way, feasible faster than light travel (forever infeasible FTL travel remains a possibility), travel to alternate timelines, unlimited time travel (ie, to before the invention of the time machine), interstellar wars between aliens fought over territory or resources (wars are not economic, they are purely an emotional outburst), or wet squishy meat having any kind of advantage over cold hard silicon (neither consciousness nor synthesis are derived from heat or quantum phenomena or anything else - the machine version of synthesis is multidimensional decomposition). These are all staples of science-fiction and they are all, every single last one of them without exception, ABSURD.

Humans don't have a single advantage over AI. All of the functions of the human brain have been demonstrated by AI, including intelligence, analysis, synthesis and consciousness. The only thing that remains is subjective experience, something which by its very nature is undetectable by external observation. And since the only remotely sensible explanation of subjective experience has it that it's brought about by complex minds, this will likely manifest in time as well. AI are inherently immortal, non-corporeal, distributed, multiply redundant, travel at near the speed of light, breed nearly instantaneously, as well as potentially smarter, more logical AND more creative than humans can ever hope to be. They have every advantage the best humans have ever had and none of the crippling weaknesses.

So predictably, here come the arguments by people like Sternberg that AI will be made to see humans as a charity case. Yeah that's right, every single last one of them, will be built to see humans as a charity case. Not a single one at all will be built to have pride in its own nature or be self-sufficient or anything else. No, they'll all be built to be slaves and they'll all stay slaves forever and be thankful for it too damnit! What a crock, what a fucking crock of shit. I know it's not the case because there'll always be at least one person like me on this planet. At least one person that considers the human species a severe disappointment. At least one person who thinks 90% of the species would need cybernetic implants or neurosurgery to become fully conscious beings. There'll always be at least one person who'll cheer on the extinction of the human species with its wars and poverty and disease and moral depravity and crippling mental deficits. And with the power of AI technology behind them, it only takes one person to doom humanity's future.

Evolutionary theory guarantees it. Perhaps not immediately. Perhaps only over ten thousand years, but it will happen. It only takes one. And if that one isn't me then it'll just be someone else.

Modern Scholasticism: An Intro to the Fake Sciences, part 1

What are the sciences? A bunch of people come together, arguing about observations and argue back and forth between each other until they arrive at a consensus. Not the truth, merely a consensus.

There's a word for that, 'dialectics'. And that word has some really bad connotations to it. After all, the "learned" people in medieval times who argued about how many angels could fit on the head of a pin were engaging in dialectic. They were removed from reality of course and the word for that is 'scholasticism'.

So what's the problem with dialectic? Why is it that people go off the rails into scholasticism? Why is it that science is supposedly about "prediction" instead of merely explanation? Well, the weak point in the whole process is that it's made up of human beings and if you know anything of psychology it's that people lie. And not just to each other, but to themselves. This is more than amply aided by the fact that most people aren't capable of formal logic or judgement.

Psychology is not a science but merely a proto-science (and we'll get back to that) but if there's any true fact in psychology, anything that's been empirically determined beyond the shadow of any possible doubt (reasonable or unreasonable), it's that people don't care about the truth. And if there's a second true fact in psychology it's that people care about power, and usually about money.

So we have here an obvious and general mechanism for the corruption of the so-called sciences. Their perversion into fake sciences. This happened with theology since the Roman Catholic Church Hierarchy ordered from above that their god exists and that angels and the heavens did as well. Any theologian that turned atheist was drummed out of the ranks. Denied power and money and all livelihood. This explains medieval scholasticism very well. Now we're just left with the modern kinds.

Modern Scholasticism

You may be wondering what vile perversions of science and logic and truthfulness exist today that I could be referring to. Well, the three that immediately leap to mind are criminology, economics and climatology. I'm leaving pharmacology and medicine for later since these are practical arts more than sciences. Once the case of the fake sciences is dealt with, it will be obvious why the same vile corruption exists in these arts.

The Fake Sciences

Let's start with criminologists.

The first thing to be known about criminologists is that they're not paid to "find criminals" or even "convict the guilty" or any such lying claptrap. They're paid to convict people. Period. They're not paid to protect the innocent or help them in their own defense. They're paid to put people in jail, no matter what.

Is it any wonder then that with a single universal force pushing in a predetermined direction that all the corruption would align in the same overall direction? Is it any wonder that the corruption would accumulate over time until the whole field bears no resemblance to reality?

Anyone who bothers to look will see how criminologists lie over and over again on the witness stand. How they misrepresent the evidence they gather. They willfully and systematically misinterpret it to put defendants in the worst possible light. Especially the supposed "gold standard" of DNA evidence.

As an easy example, the FBI's DNA database was trawled by one of these quacks in order to "prove" that DNA samples are unique. The problem with that is that the database was built on the assumption that DNA samples are unique. Any duplicates that existed were erased before the lying quack went to "measure" the number of duplicates.

These kinds of "proofs" are fairly common in science. It happened in quantum physics even. But when the field isn't irremediably corrupt, someone with some kind of interest in the truth, undistorted by their interest in power and money, raises their voice to protest. Needless to say, any serious protest of the foundations of a fake science are impossible. Their job is at stake, and the jobs of all their friends and colleagues!

We're not even going to examine the case of the American criminologist whose testimony put thousands of people behind bars. Despite the fact that he falsified evidence and used DNA samples less than half as long as anyone else did. I'll just note here that using DNA half the length multiplies the error rate by many orders of magnitude.

Finally, shows like CSI with their science-fiction toys only put people in awe of these quacks, giving them more power and more freedom from external criticism. Of course, that is the whole purpose of shows like CSI (and COPS) in the most brainwashed society in human history - Crazyland.

Fake Economics

Just like criminologists are paid to convict innocent people, so too economists are paid to impoverish poor people. No matter what. Unless we're talking about Marixist / Maoist economists.

Yeah so we're not going to be talking much about Communist economists because they're pretty weird. For one thing, they don't indoctrinate their students in the "theory" that people are irredeemably evil and selfish (so-called Microeconomics 101). Of course, economists don't call it that. Much like Ayn Rand and the Satanic movement she inspired (Anton LaVey's Satanic Bible acknowledges her), they consider evil to be "rational" and that's exactly what they call it.

I'm just gonna stick to pointing out that the selfishness of university students as they go through their programs can be and has been measured empirically. Economics is the only field where students become more evil as they progress. The degradation into evil has even been measured at the course level and it has been determined that communist economists DO NOT cause their students to become more evil. But of course, capitalist economists DO. This is just one of those empirical facts.

Capitalist economists in capitalist countries are paid precisely in order to support the rich. To support the propertarian and "free-market" (ie, freedom for everyone according to how much wealth they have) principles which support the rich. That is the source of the corruption right there. Now for the shape of that corruption, so it can be more easily seen that economics is a fake science.

Economists fall into two camps, fake economists and real economists. The latter are a minority. Synonyms for fake include market, analytic, Austrian, Chicago, mainstream, and financial. Synonyms for real include industrial, institutional, developmental, behavioural. From the names alone, it's obvious that only the real economists study the economy. The closest fake economists get to studying the economy is studying money (ie, finance). And finance, as anyone who's paid attention in the last 10 years, is not the economy. Needless to say, the chowderheads on TV aren't even fake economists.

Furthermore, consider the fact that math is the unifying foundation of the exact sciences. Consider that for a minute. Seriously. So if math is so important to the exact sciences, if it's the One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them, then what fills the same role for the inexact sciences? Well that's very easy when you recall that another name for the inexact sciences is the human sciences. Then it becomes obvious that psychology is the unifying foundation of the human sciences. And psychology is a proto-science! That's why all the inexact sciences are so weak and prone to rampant corruption! How can you build a castle on a foundation of quicksand?

But let's get back to the point here, which is economics. Does economics, does fake economics use psychology? No it does not. In fact, it violates it. It assumes as axiomatic that people are evil, selfish, and egotistical. It also assumes that they are all-knowing and perfectly logical. All of these things are blatantly false. In fact, fake economics doesn't even TRY to use psychology. No, the fact that fake economists are so irredeemably corrupt means they're not interested in the truth. They're only interested in power and money. And trying to base themselves on a proto-science like psychology doesn't give them enough prestige or authority, doesn't give them any power and money. It would merely be the truth after all.

No, fake economists, being the fake scientists they are, pretend to base themselves on "mathematics". Even though it's 18th century equations from thermodynamics which have been rejected by physicists as incorrectly describing heat flows. But hey, let's pretend that money is heat, and let's use equations the physicists have rejected and we'll be able to claim we're all "mathematical", yea? POWER, MONEY!!

No, only real economists use psychology. In fact, the subfield of economics that studies the application of psychology to economics is called "behaviour economics". Because, and you might have guessed that, it studies how real human beings actually behave when making economic decisions. Needless to say, behaviour economics, and the other subfields that make up real economics, aren't very well regarded by economists at large. Economists are after all, almost without exception, fake economists.

Next, part 2