The Perfect Diet Plan

Several years ago I bought a book called Games for the Superintelligent by James F. Fixx.  It contains all kinds of games and puzzles that usually require some twist or non-intuitive creative leap to solve.  The book contains an introduction entitled, "The pleasures of intelligence, and some incidental perils," that relates some amusing anecdotes featuring very intelligent people.  One of the stories theorizes a creative way to lose weight as follows.

Intelligence can cause trouble, too, by teasing the mind into supposing it can solve problems that in fact may defy solution.  One bright man, a person who on occasion enjoys a drink or two, addressed himself to the problem of losing weight while continuing to drink, with, in his own works, the following results.

"Losing weight, of course, is a matter of burning up more calories than you take in.  A calorie, as everyone knows, is defined as 'the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of one gram of water one degree centigrade'

 "Let us take a good glass of Scotch and soda.  Since a gram of water is pretty close to 1 cc (to make it simple), put in plenty of ice and fill it up to about six or seven ounces, making it, say, 200 cc.  Since it contains melting ince, its temperature must be 0 degrees centigrade (negleting the temperature lowering effects of alcohol, Scotch, and gas).

"Sooner or later the body must furnish 7400 calories (200 cc * 37 degrees C) to bring it up to body temperature.  Since the calorie-counter books show Scotch is 100 calories per shot, and club soda as 0 calories, we should be able to sit around all day, drinking Scotch and soda, and losing weight like mad.

 "P.S.: I tried this and it didn't work."  So much for the power of pure reason.

When I read this, I immediately saw the flaw in the proposed diet plan and why it did not work.  The author was too quick to give up on reason and logic because they were not the problem.  The author never reveals the flaw.  It bothered me that a book supposed to be for the superintelligent contained an error like this.  I thought of writing the author, until I saw that the book was published in 1972.  I am sure that the author did receive mail about this and I was far too late.  The author says that some problems defy solutions.  He may be right, but this one is not an example of a problem that defies solution.  His concluding remark, "So much for the power of pure reason" disturbed me the most.  There is absolutely nothing wrong with the reasoning in this case or with reasoning in general.  The reasoning is sound and the math is all correct.  There is just one tiny factual error that invalidates the whole argument.

The fact that I caught the error means nothing more than me knowing a trivial fact that the Scotch drinker and the author did not.  It does not make me more intelligent than either of them.  It does, however, illustrate how easy it is to make errors that can lead to completely wrong conclusions, even for intelligent people.  I am not sure how common the knowledge of the key fact is in this case.  The only reason that I remembered it is because of an experiment I did in a seventh grade science class.

In my science class we were attempting to measure the caloric content of food by burning it and measuring the rise in temperature of a beaker of water.  My partner and I burned a piece of a walnut.  After performing the required calculations we came up with a figure of something like 3500 calories for the walnut piece.  I was pretty sure that this could not possibly be correct.  I showed our results to the teacher, explaining that I thought we made a mistake somewhere.  He said that we probably got it right because it was a reasonable answer.  He then explained the key fact that reveals why the Scotch drinker's diet does not work.

If you already know the fact I learned that day in seventh grade science, then you already know why the diet does not work.  The Scotch drinker was using calories (with a little "c") to calculate how much energy the body would have to expend to raise the temperature of the Scotch and soda while the Calories in the Scotch (with a big "C") are actually kilocalories.  A food Calorie is 1000 of the calories defined as the amount of heat it takes to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water 1 degree Celsius.  So the 7400 calories he thought he was burning were only 7.4 Calories, hardly enough to make any difference at all for weight loss.  An equivalent way to look at it is that the Scotch contains 100,000 calories (with a little "c").  Either way, he was consuming much more than he was burning.

Now that I know more about the Calorie content of walnuts, I think my seventh grade measurement was too low.  It should have been more like 20-30 Calories rather than 3.5.  This may have been partly because we did not completely burn the walnut and because the heat transfer from flame to water was not perfectly efficient.  Some of the heat escaped into the air and some of it heated the beaker.  It could also be that we made an arithmetic error or that the walnut was smaller than I remember.  I have no way now to go back and check.  My science teacher, however, knew the results typically attained from past classes so he knew that our results were in the ballpark.  At least they were not off by a factor of 1000 as the Scotch drinker's were.

Spaceships That Fly Like Spaceships

Science fiction movies and TV shows consistently get many things wrong about flying a spaceship. Some of these errors may be intentional for ease of filming or to make things more visually appealing or intuitive for the Earth-bound audience, while some may be from ignorance.  The main issue I want to discuss here is that spaceships in movies and television fly like airplanes rather than spaceships.  This is true for practically every movie and TV show I have ever seen depicting space flight, which makes it all the more striking that one show finally got it basically correct.

First of all, let's address what most shows get wrong.  There is absolutely no reason for a spaceship to have wings unless it sometimes flies in the atmosphere of a planet.  When does so, it can and should fly like an airplane.  But in space it should still fly like a spaceship.  That means that it needs maneuvering thrusters to control its attitude along all three axes of rotation (roll, pitch, and yaw) as well as a powerful main engine.  There is no reason for a spaceship to bank when it turns.  There is nothing in space for the wings to push against.  The only thing that a spaceship can do to change its velocity (which consists of both speed and direction) is to fire its main engine or rely on the gravitational pull of a planet or star.  Very small changes in velocity can be accomplished with thrusters alone (when docking, for example), but large changes require the main engine.  The thrusters are primarily for attitude control to point the main engine in the right direction for firing.

So how could a real spaceship execute something like a 90 degree turn?  There would hardly ever be a reason for such a maneuver.  Trajectories are carefully planned because adjustments are very costly.  Furthermore, it would be difficult to define what a 90 degree turn in space is.  It would need to be relative to something.  Everything is in motion: every star, every planet, every asteroid, and every comet.  If they were not in motion, gravity would pull them all together.  There is no such thing as absolute rest (something every Star Trek series got wrong with their "full stop" commands).

So ignoring these difficulties for a moment, lets execute a 90 degree turn.  We will ignore gravity (which we can never do in the real universe) and execute a 90 degree turn in a hypothetical gravity-free coordinate system.  Lets suppose we are traveling at 20,000 mph in the y direction.  In order to turn so that we are now traveling at 20,000 mph in the x direction, what do we do?  We cannot simply bank and turn using our current momentum.  We have to completely stop our momentum in the y direction and then get it going in the x direction.  We can do this with a combination of maneuvers or with a single maneuver.  With a single maneuver, we would use thrusters to point our spaceship so its nose is pointed towards the positive x and negative y direction at a 45 degree angle (towards quadrant IV in a Cartesian coordinate system).  We would then fire for the appropriate amount of time.  We could calculate the firing length ahead of time using vectors.  Alternately, we can point our ship backwards relative to our direction of travel and fire our engine until our velocity is 0.  Then we can point our nose in then new direction and fire our engine until our new velocity in that direction is 20,000 mph.  Either way we do it would consume exactly the same amount of fuel because two directions of motion are independent from a physics standpoint.  It is also exactly the amount of fuel required to completely reverse our direction and go back where we came at the same speed.

Real spaceships fly in 3 dimensions similar to the way the spaceship flies in 2 dimensions in the classic arcade game, Asteroids.  The only thing the Asteroids spaceship gets wrong is the inertia of rotation.  In a real spaceship you fire thrusters to start rotating and then you have to fire again to stop it.  Just like our simple example, the Asteroids game ignores gravity.  In the real universe we cannot ignore gravity because it affects every trajectory.  When a spaceship leaves planetary orbit, it is still in orbit around a star.  When it leaves a solar system, it is still in orbit about the center of the galaxy.  Galaxies and galaxy clusters mutually orbit each other also.  Our spaceship is part of this complex system of orbits within orbits and nothing is at rest.  We can usually just take into account the most dominant gravitational body, but the point is that we are always orbiting something, even if our orbit is hyperbolic.  Orbital dynamics can be very non-intuitive, but that is a subject for another time.

So which show gets it right?  It is not always exactly right, but very often the small fighters in Battlestar Galactica fly almost like real spaceships.  They use thrusters to control their attitude and they do not always point in their direction of travel.  They tumble without changing their velocity.  Sometimes you can see them adjusting their attitude and then firing their main engine to maneuver.  The trajectories and maneuvers are much more like those of a real spaceship than any other show I have seen.  Above all, they do not turn by simply banking and continuing to basically fly forward.  They do have wings, but that is because they are capable of flying in a planetary atmosphere.  I am sure that this was no accident.  Undoubtedly, they had good advisors and chose to try for greater realism, at least in this one area.

The Power of Conviction

It is a curious fact that, in my observation, people seem to have strong convictions only about that which is unknown or even unknowable.  Imagine someone expressing the conviction that the force of gravity follows an inverse square law.  We just do not hear people expressing strong convictions about well-established facts on which there is widespread agreement.

People express convictions about religion, politics, the best way to raise children, the best sports teams, and the best schools to attend.  You do not typically hear convictions expressed about the general theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, or the atomic structure of matter.  These ideas have been very carefully built up from piles of evidence and careful, rigorous logic.  There is no need for convictions.

The very fact that someone feels a need to express a conviction is, to me, an admission that something is a shaky proposition.  In other words, strength of conviction typically does not correlate with the actual probability that something is true, but usually quite the opposite.  I would even add one more category to those on which people typically express convictions: unknown, unknowable, and demonstrably false.

Many convictions do not really deal with truth at all in any objective way.  Some convictions are about how we ought to best treat each other.  This is part of the broader categories of ethics and morals.  I do have opinions about this that may rise to the level of convictions, and I will likely express them at some point.  However, this is more human convention than anything else.  It does not go against my assertion that strength of conviction is unrelated to truth.

I have not yet mentioned God, so I will do that now.  Some people have the conviction that they speak for God or that they know what God wants other people to do.  These convictions may include God's word being available in a particular book.  These types of claims are many and varied.  I do not doubt the strength of convictions such as these.  What I question is that the strength of a conviction constitutes proof of anything whatsoever.

My approach to questions of God and religion is pragmatic.  Do what works for you.  Do what helps you make sense of things and helps you find meaning, and leave me free to do the same.  Above all, do not assume that what you have found to work for you necessarily works for everyone, and give up the notion that it represents any sort of absolute universal truth.  It is enough that it works for you.

Remember that your strength of conviction proves nothing.  Of course, I have merely been expressing my convictions on this subject.  So you are free to take it or leave it.  I have not proved anything either.

Meeting My Soulmate

Five years ago this month is my fifth wedding anniversary.  My sweetheart and I found each other on the New Order Mormon message board.  We sent our first emails on Valentines Day 2007.  We carried on a long-distance relationship, flying to see each other as often as we could afford, until we were married later that year.  While driving back home to Colorado after our honeymoon, I received and accepted a job offer in California.  Less than a month after we were married, we were together in California

My wife and I have so many important things in common that it seemed unreal when we first started discovering this.  We are both former Mormons and both of us were divorced by our former spouses when we could no longer accept all the beliefs of that faith. We are both accomplished musicians.  We both love to read and listen to audio books.  We both love to learn.  She also has two bachelor's degrees and recently finished a master's degree.  I was intrigued when we first started writing that her degrees were in psychology and sociology and yet she taught high school math and had also taught chemistry, band, and choir.  When I was a freshman in college and first heard of the concept of a renaissance man, I decided that's what I wanted to be.  It was exciting to find a real renaissance woman with interests as diverse as my own and with so much overlap.

Our common interests are not the best part.  The best part is that she is so genuinely kind and compassionate with nothing but the best intentions toward every living creature.  That would have been enough even if we did not share so many interests.  We share a deep emotional bond because our experiences growing up affected us so similarly.  We can each empathize with the other in almost any situation.

After five years we are still deeply in love.  It has felt like one long honeymoon since the day we were married.  After my first marriage, I did not know that this was possible.  Life can be surprising.

Introduction

Hello.  This is my first blog post ever.  I am interested in a wide variety of subjects.  I am a musician and a software developer.  I am a former Mormon, and now a practicing Catholic (practicing as in trying to get better).  However, I do not define myself by my career or my religion.  I insist on deciding what to think for myself rather than parroting some organization.

Although I am a registered Democrat, I do not define myself by that party's platform.  I used to be a registered Republican and my current views overlap both parties.  I decide what to think on an issue by issue basis.  On a great number of topics I have no opinion at all.  I don't have enough information.  I have some strong opinions and many non-opinions.  I do not feel compelled to have an opinion on every subject.

I love learning and never plan to stop.  I have two bachelor's degrees in unrelated subjects.  I also have a master's degree and almost a second, again unrelated.  I have studied other subjects in enough depth to have other degrees, which is not hard in today's free information climate.  The more I learn, the more ignorant I feel.  Not all learning expands the mind.  We can become so wrapped up in what we think we know that we close ourselves to other possibilities.

Max Planck, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, said "science advances one funeral at a time."  This is a testament to the difficulty we humans have of changing our minds and letting go of dearly held beliefs, regardless of how much evidence mounts against them.  I aspire to try to buck that trend, but who knows whether or not I succeed.  I am too close to my own thoughts to perceive them objectively.  Probably the best I can hope for is to know that I know nothing, as Socrates did.