Lessons From Astronomy

Image: NASA

If Orion is visible in the east just before dawn, then it must be August.  Empires may rise and fall and governments may rewrite calendars, but no project of man can alter the course of the stars in the sky. I saw Orion this morning and it was August. They can take away my office and my phone, my calendar and computers, they can shutter the schools and burn all the books, but they cannot budge Orion from his track through the sky. It is August.

Read Better Books

Books are generally a waste of time. Most books are not worth the paper they are printed on, and I have actually burned quite a few books in my day. One time I was in a remote part of the Outback, and I needed fuel for the water heater so that I could take a hot shower. A book happened to be the most readily available fuel source for this task, and it was some random piece of trash that I had already read, so up in smoke it went. I don’t tell that story very often, even though I did the right thing. I had a warm shower that morning, which is a lot more benefit than I ever got from reading that stupid book.

Counterinsurgency for Aid and Development Organizations

Counterinsurgency is primarily a political operation, not a military one. The only reason the military even gets involved is because, as Mao Tse-Tung wrote, Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. The reason insurgencies happen is because people are violently dissatisfied with their legitimate government. It is then up to the legitimate government to change in a way that redresses people’s grievances. Aid and development organizations end up playing a major role in this process. Unfortunately, the members of such organizations do not think of themselves as counterinsurgents, and they tend not to behave like people waging a war. As a result the military has extensive literature on the topic of counterinsurgency, the aid community has virtually none. This is backward.

The South Pole

“(T)he kingdom of Kabul, without Kandahar, was like a head without a nose, or a fort without any gate.” –Abdur Rahman, Amir of Afghanistan, 1900

For B.

There is a small garden outside my window which I can see as I write this. An isolated plant sticks up out of the flat, cleared soil, and it does not have flowers right now. I know that plants have roots that are at least as extensive as the parts I can see. Half of a plant is buried in dirt, the other half is buried in air.

Kill your television

If, today, you extirpate all televisions from your home, you will effectively add, on average, ten years to your life. There is no funny business to this, the calculation is simple.

On time, part three: the physics of becoming

Most, if not all, accepted systems of measurement take time to be a fundamental quantity. Time, however, has been something difficult to define. Why do we take it to be a fundamental quantity? There is no reason why it must be done this way. If we order our physics on a somewhat different scheme, then some simple dimensional analysis makes time much easier to understand.

On time, part two: hope

We all know that oil and water do not mix. The reason they do not mix is that the water molecule is polar– it has a lopsided electrical charge– and the oil molecule is not. Polar molecules have a positively charged end and a negatively charged end, and they can form various bonds that exploit positive/ negative attraction.  Water is a strongly polar molecule, which leads to its myriad exceptional physical properties. Water molecules self-organize according to polarity, creating surface tension, six-sided snowflakes, and a frozen form that is less dense than the liquid form. The strong polar forces in water are also able to tear apart molecules such as salt, which is why water can dissolve so many substances.

On time, part one: two speeches

The granite of Mt. Rushmore gives in to the forces of erosion at a rate of one inch every 10,000 years. In human terms, that amounts to no erosion at all; 10,000 years ago, our species was just discovering agriculture (http://alamanach.com/untitled/). Rock that hard could not have been easy to carve. Still, erode it does; Mt. Rushmore, like everything, is forever in a process of becoming something else.

Something to be afraid of

In the rural areas just outside Bangkok, most folks keep one or more dogs. Dogs are useful in guarding property out here away from the protection of the city. On a walk yesterday through one of these rural areas, I accidentally wandered onto someone else’s land, and was confronted by her three snarling rotweilers. Out here, rotweilers have been known to kill their owners, never mind what they do to trespassers.