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Living in ground zero

In the previous blog I have suggested that we are living in a dangerous era. The president of the United States and his minions are creating the most divisive environment in our country since the last Civil War. I say the last Civil War because so much of the current administration is moving us toward a second Civil War.

If we are unable to head off this calamitous social destruction it will be warfare between the suburbs and the agricultural states versus the big cities, particularly on the coasts.

During the last Civil War there were many people on both sides who did not concur with the predominant values of the area in which they lived.  Not just the slaves in the South but a good percentage of the southern urban population did not support slavery or the Confederate efforts to protect it.  Many in the North opposed slavery but were uncomfortable freeing the slaves.

During the coming Civil War the same will be true. People like me will be living in the urban areas that will be attacked by the rural and suburban population.

As I think about this scenario, I realize that I live in ground zero. San Francisco is considered the most radical Left wing city in America even though nearby Marin, Berkeley and Santa Cruz are more extreme. Within San Francisco I live in the most perceived Lefty neighborhood.  The gay Castro district.

If such an imaginary Civil War II occurs, guerrilla squads will come to the center of the Castro and start firing on people.

The most defensive act I could take would be to put on my military clothes. When I was in the Army Reserves during the hippie era we were always assured by our officers that the military would never be used to put down civil uprisings. I think that would still be true.

I know this sounds a little paranoid, maybe very paranoid, but I say it with the intent of suggesting this as a possibility not stating it as fact.

The pure case

I stopped collecting and analyzing global warming data when I realized that the data was being ideologically distorted. It has been a while since I began ignoring the data.  I have since been viewing the supporters of global warming as pathetic people controlled by hysteria. Despite the fact that these sad people are often my friends and family members.

I am now in a worse position because it is no longer a matter of defective data manipulated by Lefty perverts. It is now a case of pure blindness.

In all science, there is always the possibility of a pure case experiment. The pure case experiment is a situation where the data cannot be manipulated, where the data has only one explanation and where the data explains the entire phenomenon.

Such is the case with the data at the bottom of this blog. The cumulative snowfall in the Sierra Mountains for over 130 years is recorded for one number each year. The cumulative total for the period is recorded and the annual variance is shown on the chart in standard deviations.

The perfect climate character of this data comes from the fact that the atmosphere that drops the snow has moved for 10 days over the Pacific ocean collecting water and moved one-half day later to drop the water in the mountains.  When the temperature is close to freezing the cloud water becomes snow.  The cumulative snow pack is what is measured in this chart. Being cumulative eliminates daily and monthly variation. You don’t need an average. There is virtually no human development or urban heat sink involved over the eleven day movement of the air one third of the way around the earth.

In this pure case we find no change in the snowpack over 130 years. We find no bullshit 'climate change' in the variance over that period.

Global warming and climate change are simply fictional.  This is a pure case. People who cannot grasp this fact have either hysteria, ideological blindness or an inability to comprehend simple statistics.

Science is fiction

I wish to make a statement that will seem absurd to most of my wonderful and smart readers: most science is fiction.

This is not about fiction with science in it, which is called science-fiction.

I am saying that Newton's laws are fiction. For every action there is a reaction, equal and opposite is not a core truth of the universe. I am saying it is merely a satisfactory linguistic label to describe a wide range of experiments and actions.

Three things lead me to make this statement.  First, the American Physical Society signed on to a statement supporting human caused climate change. Few things in my mind could be more absurd.' Climate change' is a non sequitur. Change is measured by deviation from the mean: standard deviation is a mathematical construct. Not a living person has ever shown that the standard deviation of any climate mean is greater or lesser in the past millennia.

Second, the interest and excitement surrounding faster than light neutrinos found in Italay in the OPERA experiment is much too negligible for me.  It turns out that for 40 years there has been occasional experimental evidence that neutrinos have unusual attributes related to photons. What has happened is that one giant piece of technology,CERN, has brought quantum and Einsteinian theory into question.  Another piece of giant technology at Fermilab will do the experiment in a different form, MINOS.

This takes me to my main hypothesis: technology deals with the empiric world around us. Engineers build bridges and learn from the bridges that fall down. Engineers always build their products to be three times the strength theoretically needed because engineers inherently understand the limits of their knowledge. Three cheers for engineers.


Physics is the sequence of technical constructions and the numeric information that these technical instruments generate. Newton's theories came from Galileo's sloped wooden board that he used to measure the acceleration of gravity.

The third source of my perspective comes from a class that Niels Bohr taught in first year physics at the University of Chicago. My university. Bohr said that all physics was the explanation that connected constants. He proceeded to put a series of constants on the board, starting with g, the gravitational constant that was ultimately part of Newton’s theories.  He proceeded to list a dozen constants including Maxwell's and Hertz's.  He argued that all physics theory was simply the connection between the constants. We call those connections 'science'.

I go farther and suggest that it was the technology that finds the constants that is the only meaningful connection between our world and the emperic world we live in. We create fictional stories to connect these brilliant engineering feats.

Some may say that a great deal of this fictional creation involves math and is therefore less fictional. I have always been comfortable understanding that the universe of math is so large that science can always pick and choose an equation to fit the fiction. If Euclid's geometry is inadequate we can use non-Euclidean geometry.

Science is really fiction in the many languages and metaphors of math.