Can a Mobile Game Make You Smarter?

For the past couple of weeks, I've been playing a game called Brain Builder, which claims that it will literally make you smarter.  There is actually some research to back this up, and after playing the game for a while, I'm starting to believe it myself.

The basic concept is pretty simple.  The game consists of a grid of nine squares (like a tick-tac-toe board).  The game will display a blue square in one of the spaces every few seconds, accompanied by a spoken letter.

Your job is to press the buttons on the bottom of the screen if the position of the blue square or the spoken letter matches what was displayed or spoken previously.  If the job was to simply match the previous position or letter, the game would be trivially easy for anyone over the age of three.  However, you have to match based on not the very last item, but the one that was 2 back.  The match may be to the position, the spoken letter, neither, or both.  That's it!

This deceptively simple game is really, really hard.  When deciding if the latest item matches, you need to temporarily skip over the previous item and match to the one that's two back in the sequence.  But you can't forget the previous item, because it will be two back in a couple of seconds!  In this way, you need to keep three things in mind (the current, the previous, and the two-back), and keep shifting the old ones out of your memory and the new ones into their new positions.  Even so, this would be relatively easy if only one thing needed to be remembered.  But the visual stimulus (position) and auditory stimulus (letter) need to be separately remember and weighed in your decision, since they may match or not match independently.  These combinations of challenges make it very difficult.  I've gotten better at it, but it's still very challenging.  It really feels like a workout!

What the game is really exercising is your working memory and your attention.  If your attention wanders even slightly, you will start messing up, and it's very hard to get back on track.  I can already feel that my powers of concentration are improving as a result of playing this game.

The version of the game I'm playing, from developer High Secret, has its flaws.  For a non-free program ($1.50) it should really have a volume control and an Android menu.  It also has no levels.  What I've described is the whole game.  It's been plenty for now, and will continue to be plenty for a while.  But I just learned that other versions of this game (generally called N-Back) are available, and this one from developer Philip Nguyen, has a 3-back level, and is free.  I will certainly be trying this one soon.  There seem to be iPhone versions as well.  Search for "brain n-back" in the App Store.

I definitely recommend this type of N-back game for anyone who wants to use their gaming time to feel like they're actually improving their brain!

Book Review: "About Time" Is Worth the Time

About Time is a substantial book, 432 dense pages in hardcover, and about 13 hours in the well-narrated audiobook (which I listened to).  It requires a bit of concentration to get through, since it covers a lot of ground and weaves together several threads of thought.  The author, Adam Frank, provides just the right amount of repetition to keep us mindful of the threads of time in both cosmology and the daily lives of people in the cultures that he follows through 50,000 years of human history.  Frank's skill, along with the many fascinating historical facts he describes, make the book an informative and enjoyable journey that I would recommend for anyone interested in how we perceive time.


Though the focus is on cosmology (the study of the universe as whole), the book is almost a complete history of science, at a very high level.  There is no math, and the explanations are very clear, at least for the well-understood stuff like Ptolemy's astronomy and Newton's mechanics.  Things get a little murkier towards the end of the book, when Frank tries to explain the myriad astronomical and cosmological theories of today.  There is so much ground to cover there that the intertwined threads of cosmology and culture get lost for a few chapters, and that part of the book was not as enjoyable as the earlier parts.  This is not entirely Frank's fault, since the many mutually incompatible or vague theories of today are simply murkier for everyone.  While these later chapters loose some of the enjoyable interplay of ideas, the densely presented scientific facts are a great overview of the frontiers of today's physics.  


About Time really shines when Frank describes how the human experience of lived time has evolved over the millennia and centuries.  Our hunter-gatherer ancestors and neolithic farmers lived by the seasons.  As agriculture enabled humans to settle in permanent cities, the day began to be divided more and more precisely.  The invention of mechanical clocks and their placement in city squares enabled a shared time to be experienced, and also brought about new cosmological theories of clockwork universes.  The descriptions of time's role in the industrial revolution and how radio and the washing machine shaped the human experience of time in the twentieth century opened my eyes to a lot of new facts and ideas about our civilization.  Throughout the book, Frank does a great job describing the intertwined forces of material engagement through technology, cultural conceptions of time, and cosmological theories.  


Reading About Time gave me a new appreciation for how culture and human ideas shape our experience of time.  It should be enjoyable for any fan of physics, technology, and history.

The Lipid Hypothesis

As far as I know, I never reached 300 pounds, but there were a couple of months when I avoided stepping on the scale because I didn't want to know.  There are two main reasons why I was able to loose over 100 pounds in the last three years.  The first reason is that I stopped taking a certain prescription medication, but that's a story for another day.  This post is about the second reason, which is diet.  By that I mean what kinds of foods I eat, not some sort of counting program.  I follow a specific variant of the Paleo diet.  The premise of this diet is that, as a species, we have not yet had time to adapt to the types of food available to us in agricultural societies.  This means that some individuals are unable to properly digest many foods that are ubiquitous in our society, including all sugars, grains, starchy vegetables and processed foods.  We unlucky ones can only eat what our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate in the Paleolithic period of pre-history, primarily meat and vegetables.

I most definitely did not loose 50 pounds by "eating less, moving more".  This "common sense" advice assumes the human body is like a car that takes only one type of fuel, which is clearly not the case.  There was virtually no exercise involved in my weight loss, except for walking a few times a week, only beginning in recent months.  I eat as much as I want--of the foods that are allowed--and this can be a substantial amount.  This diet is simultaneously more challenging and easier than counting-type diets where you simply eat less of everything.  Fully 80% of the average grocery store or restaurant menu is off limits to me, which means I generally have to plan ahead and provide my own food in many places.  The surprising upside of this is that shopping and restaurant ordering are much easier and quicker, because there are so few options.  I find it much easier to have hard-and-fast rules on food type and not have to worry about quantity.  And except for sugar cravings that go away after a few days, I feel more full and satisfied now than I ever did when I was chowing cookies and ice cream all day.

In addition to the unlimited quantities, the specific diet I'm on achieves high tummy satisfaction by making sure you get enough fat.  While the diet is wholly compatible with the Paleo concept, it goes a bit further, positing a specific malady called gut dysbiosis.  I never thought I had troublesome digestive symptoms, but again, this is a case where we tend to oversimplify our bodies.  Just because you don't have constipation, diarrhea, or painful gas doesn't mean all is well within your gut.  Digestion is a system of hundreds of interlocking chemical reactions, producing many different products your body needs.  Your intestines contain more bacterial cells than there are human cells in the rest of your body, and many of these microbes are performing absolutely essential digestive functions.  Unless, that is, certain harmful microbial species have taken over and are suppressing the beneficial bacteria.  Gut dysbiosis tends to run in families, but by environmental transmission, not heredity.  Various types of life events, including taking broad-spectrum antibiotics, can cause populations of harmful vs. benign and beneficial species of gut flora to shift in an unhealthy direction.  A diet high in sugar feeds the baddies, and the gut lining becomes damaged from their toxic output.  This "leaky gut" allows partially digested products from our Neolithic diet, such as wheat gluten, to pass into the blood stream where a host of subsequent reactions occur, including neurotoxic and auto-immune responses.  The GAPS diet aims to cure many modern medical conditions by restoring the dominance of beneficial bacteria in the gut so it can becomes a source of nutrition rather than toxins.

I used to eat TUMS like candy, but when I stopped eating sugar, I never got acid reflux again.  I used to get sleepy in the afternoons, but when I stopped eating grains, this stopped happening.  Sometimes things that we think are unavoidable, or are part of the way our body works, can be changed dramatically by changing the type of fuel we put into our bodies.  When I was at my heaviest, I had sleep apnea and type II diabetes. Mainstream medicine gave me a pharmacological mechanism for getting my blood sugar down, but that was maintenance with side effects, not a cure.  Nutritionally, they told me to count grams of carbs, which is extremely difficult and resulted in feeling deprived all the time, since I still had all the cravings.  After only a few months on a Paleo diet, my type II diabetes had completely disappeared, and I went off the medication.  The sleep apnea also went away, presumably from weight loss.

Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride created the GAPS diet to cure her son's autism, which she did successfully.  You read that right; many conditions that are considered incurable diseases by mainstream medicine can be completely reversed by eating real food instead of the chemicals that come from today's large agri-businesses.  Due to the spectacular nature of these claims, the GAPS diet has been met with a lot of skepticism, but I predict anecdotal successes such as my own will gradually increase participation until medical research is forced to take a closer look at it.  Some conditions are reversed more are easily than others, and the average person may not be able to follow the required diet in today's world.  In order for this type of healing to become available to more people, we need to address the biases of our Western medicine and demand local, natural whole foods from our grocers.

One big reason GAPS is meeting resistance is the emphasis on getting enough fat, which is healing to the gut and provides vital nutrients.  Indeed, any doctor knows the essential role fats like cholesterol play the the body, so why would a high-fat diet be such a seemingly controversial suggestion?  Three words: The Lipid Hypothesis.  You may not have heard the phrase before, but you know the lipid hypothesis well.  This is why we have so many low-fat and fat-free products on our supermarket shelves, and why everyone "knows" that fat in the diet is what causes heart disease.  So then, why is heart disease still our major killer, after decades of declining fat and cholesterol consumption?  Why do certain cultures who eat high fat diets have low prevalence of heart disease?  Simple: the lipid hypothesis is unproved, and I believe, dead wrong.  From Wikipedia:

German pathologist Rudolf Virchow in 1856 suggested that blood lipid accumulation in arterial walls causes atherosclerosis. An accumulation of evidence has led to the acceptance of the lipid hypothesis as scientific fact by the medical community; however, a small but vocal minority contend that it has not yet been properly validated, and that vascular inflammatory mechanisms prevail independent of blood cholesterol levels. 

When my blood cholesterol levels rose after starting the diet, my doctor was suitably alarmed.  But when I protested that inflammation causes heart disease, she had no counter-argument, being a good, progressive doctor.  Now I may have a heart attack tomorrow, so the jury will remain out until I have decades of history, if indeed my cholesterol levels remain high.  If I can start running again regularly, my HDL/LDL ratio ought to change, even if the total level doesn't.  There are certainly a lot of pieces to the puzzle, and everyone is different. 

The main thing the lipid hypothesis has going for it is the consensus agreement of the medical community, along with, of course, the media, the food industry, and the makers of statin drugs.  Other ideas that once had to battle scientific consensus include the notions that the earth is a sphere and that small, invisible entities called "germs" are the cause of most diseases.  Confusing wide acceptance of an idea with proof of its validity is a common logical fallacy, according to the list my tenth grader showed me a couple weeks ago.

There are other low-carb diets which help people lose weight, most notably the high-fat Atkins diet and low-fat South Beach diet.  These diets work by starving the body of sugars from which to make glucose, forcing it to switch to an alternative process known as ketosis for powering cells.  I lost a lot of weight when I was on Atkins many years ago, when I constantly ate little but steak, eggs, and bacon.  However, like many people, I found the diet very unsatisfying, and could not stick to it.

Depending on implementation, GAPS may be a ketogenic diet, but this is not its primary purpose.  GAPS is based on the Specific Carbohydrate Diet, which, as its name implies, is based on restricting the specific types of carbs consumed, not the amount.  The purpose of the SCD is to address gut dysbiosis.  Unfortunately, there are no tests for gut dysbiosis, so following an SCD-based diet is as much trial and error as anything else in medicine.

Again and again in my medical history I've discovered that doctors know almost nothing about what my body is doing or how the treatments they prescribe will affect it.  Modern Western medicine is based on statistical models and trial-and-error.  If treatments are found to be effective in a large enough percentage of the population, these treatments are then prescribed to individuals on the presumption that the individual probably falls into the group which is helped by the treatment.  If this turns out to be not the case, then other treatments are tried.  When multiple treatments exists, or when a treatment doesn't work for everyone, there is almost never a test which will tell you in advance if the treatment will work for you or not.  I started taking statin drugs because I had high cholesterol and the statistical models showed that many people with high cholesterol develop heart disease which can be prevented by the drugs.  There were no tests done to see if I was actually developing the early stages of atherosclerosis, nor any tests done to see if I would be one of the ones who benefited from taking a statin.  In retrospect, taking the drug probably didn't do much except help encourage the development of type II diabetes. 

Medical science is amazing, having worked out many fantasitcally complex systems, as illustrated by the following chart that illustrates how statins affect the levels of cholesterol in the blood. 

 However, once you start to see that the actual practice of modern medicine is often nothing more than taking shots in the dark, it begins to look more like pseudo-science.  Yes, many lives are saved, but mostly by luck, when you fall into the norm that the treatment model was designed to address.  Demand to know why your doctor is prescribing a treatment for you, and how you will together measure whether or not its being effective.

It would be absolutely impossible for me to be on this diet if it wasn't for my wife Carol constantly cooking for me: homemade soups, roasts, ghee, and yogurt, just to name a few.  Thanks, love.

Book Review: The End of Faith, by Sam Harris

I'm very glad Sam Harris wrote The End of Faith, and it took great courage for him to write it. He travels with bodyguards now, due to multiple death threats. What did he say to earn such hatred? Paraphrased, he said, to the believers in the God of Abraham, "Your faith is dangerous nonsense." This is very much against the mainstream current of our culture, to dare to directly criticize someone's religious beliefs. Just recently, the President of the U.S. apologized publicly because some Korans accidentally got burned by the military. Apparently, showing even unintended disrespect for this book is much worse than killing and maiming innocent children, something President Obama does every time he authorizes a drone strike, but for which he has never apologized. In daring to criticize Islam most severely and directly, Sam Harris is taking exactly the opposite approach. It remains to be seen which approach will bear the fruit of peaceful coexistence in the long run, but I applaud Harris for having the guts to state the unpopular position and bringing up some very troubling and important questions about the prevailing moral beliefs of our age.

As you may know, I am a devout atheist myself. I think believing that the Bible is literally true, or that a God like the one described there exists is at best extremely unlikely, and in my judgement, preposterous and absurd. I don't feel the need to offer an alternative explanation for the origin of the universe in order to say that Rick Santorum's God is as silly as all the other creation myths created by all the other cultures which do not share his Christian traditions.

While Harris is clearly a nonbeliever, he is not really pushing an atheist agenda. His main premise is that the existence of fundamentalism, in particular Muslim fundamentalism, is a threat to our existence as a species in this age of Weapons of Mass Destruction.  Given the number of well-documented suicide attacks carried out by radical Muslims, it's hard to deny that significant danger exists unless we learn to quell the anger of these people or control access to WMDs.  As Harris describes, neither outcome seems likely, certainly not as long as "freedom of religious expression" is allowed to enjoy its privileged place in our world of ideas.  Harris gives religious moderates a thorough drubbing as well, given the enabling role they play for allowing literalist interpretations of our sacred texts which inspire extremists.  He does, however, leave a door open to religion, particularly Islam, "fixing" itself by downgrading its sacred texts to the status of myth, and accepting modernity.  In order for us to survive, Harris contends, we must remove faith, i.e., certainty without evidence, from its privileged place of being off-limits to criticism.

There is much I dislike about The End of Faith, particularly with regard to Harris' prescriptions for what we should do about the danger posed by faith.  The book is decidedly alarmist, trying to rouse us to action to face this danger.  Harris spends considerable time tearing down ideas that I still hold dear, even after reading his book: that preemptive war is evil, and that American foreign policy, such as military intervention in the Middle East and our support of secular Arab tyrants is partly responsible for Muslim terrorism against the West.  Harris argues that said tyrants, while undeniably evil, are holding back the greater evil of the theocratic states which would inevitably arise if the Muslims of the Middle East were given self-determination.  And while he admits that a nuclear first strike against a nuclear-armed Islamist state would be a horrible crime, he defends this possibility as the lesser evil compared to allowing Islam to conquer the Western world.  I personally would rather live under sharia law than be responsible for the nuclear annihilation of all Muslims.

Harris also spends time defending the excesses of Israeli occupation and oppression of minorities by saying that nobody else would be more restrained and reasonable in a similar situation.  Maybe so, but the situation could be changed.  I believe Harris fails to see the bigger picture in his support for Israeli oppression and apartheid, and his promotion of the idea that the West is, in fact, at war with Islam.  Since questions of religious identity form the basis of the Israeli-Arab conflict, it's a little frustrating for atheists like myself, who see the whole conflict as people fighting over who has the best imaginary friend.

Harris argues that Western meddling in the Muslim world is not the main reason for Islamic terrorism, and that the central tenets of Islam would invent reasons to war with the West if we had not provided them with reasons such as our support for Israel and secular Arab tyrants.  I disagree.  I think if contemporary politics did not provoke the anger of Muslims, there would be room for moderation and modernization in Islam.  The greatest evidence for this comes from Harris' own data, which shows that sentiment regarding the West and the justification for terrorism varies by nation, with the most extreme views being held in those parts of the world most torn by recent violent conflict.

Harris' imagination also fails when he holds up militarism as the best response to the threat of militant Islamism.  Granted, Harris would prefer that we would all give up our faith and turn to reason in conducting human relations.  That is why he wrote The End of Faith, and why he founded Project Reason.  In this respect, our ideals may be the same, and our missions overlap (Project Reason's tagline is "Spreading Science and Secular Values").  However, I believe these values can only be spread by persuasion, not by bombs and guns.  Harris charts a confusing zig-zag path of moral calculus by trying to simultaneously acknowledge and condemn the atrocities the U.S. has carried out in the world while also elevating them above the atrocities of Muslim terrorists by claiming intent is what matters.  First, I am sure Harris does not know everything our leaders know when they plan their bombing raids, and to claim that they do not intend civilian casualties seems very naive at best.  But more importantly, I don't think the victim of violence really cares whether his injury or death resulted from intentional harm or the sloppy violence of collateral damage.  Harris' own text seems to indicate his confusion and self-contradiction.  The footnote to his sentence "Where ethics are concerned, intentions are everything." concludes "Intentions matter, but they are not all that matter."

Harris' defense of American collateral damage as morally superior to the intentional civilian carnage of the suicide bomber relies on thought experiments about how different people would use "perfect weapons" (those which can be employed risk-free without collateral damage).  Such weapons do not exist, so debating how George Bush might use them vs. how Osama bin Laden might use them is an exercise in mental masturbation.  We must judge people's actions in the real world in which we live.  Harris also criticizes pacifism as a deeply immoral philosophy, on the grounds that failure to defend ourselves and our neighbors against antisocial, destructive people is permitting suffering to occur needlessly.  I basically agree with Harris that a dogmatic, absolute pacifism does give too much leeway to immoral, violent people, but this is a straw man argument.  Harris himself acknowledges that hardly any of us are pacifist to this degree.  People like myself believe not in complete non-violence, but in non-aggression, that is, against taking the first swing.

Harris argues that a transition to civil society cannot be made without forcing people to be civil at the point of a gun.  Fundamental to this belief is Harris' criticism of pacifism and subsequent justification of preemptive war.  Following this logic to its extreme shows its absurdity: we should just kill everyone, since the potential for violence exists everywhere.  Back in the real world, preemptive war is a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Hate and violence breeds hate and violence.  Contrary to Harris' obsessive need to control all risk, no matter what the cost, we could, in fact, wait and see if any Islamic terrorists obtain and use WMDs.  If they do, it would be a tragedy for sure, but then we could respond, militarily or otherwise, to a proportional degree, and with real moral superiority, since we would not be violating the non-aggression principle.  If we reject preemptive war, maybe the feared massive terrorist attacks will never come.  In fact, if the President of the U.S. said publicly that we would no longer invade other nations, this would do much to quell the fear which drives the terrorism in the first place.  If the United States condemned nuclear weapons and unilaterally destroyed much of its current arsenal, that might be a sign to the world that maybe they are not a good idea.  Instead, we invade non-nuclear states and leave alone the nuclear ones, all but guaranteeing that any rational head of state will want his own nuclear weapons.

Harris thoroughly rejects moral relativism, the belief that we should not judge other cultures based on the standards which developed in our culture.  I believe Harris has again gotten his head too much in the clouds on this one, and is arguing an abstract debate which has little relevance in the real world.  I agree with him that absolute moral judgement can and should be made, but I think these judgments should be few and far between.  I also feel that cultural relativism is is very important and relevant in determining what solutions should be applied to injustice.  The simple fact of the matter is that the Christian-dominated West has a long history of making problems worse by the particular means we choose to solve them.  We simply don't know enough and are not perfect enough ourselves to suggest or enforce solutions to moral injustice.  Again, intentions do not matter as much as results.  People and nations of the world must be left to self-determination if evolution to peaceful coexistence is to be achieved.  We can lead by example, but we cannot force people to be moral by our standards by bombing them.

Ultimately, acceptance of Harris' ideas on the moral appropriateness of preemptive war relies on how much one agrees with his conclusion that the survival of civilization depends on eliminating Islam and other faith-based judgments from public discourse.  He sees the situation as very dire, life and death.  I do not.  While one or two nuclear or biological terrorist attacks would be horrible tragedies, civilization as we know if would not end with such an occurrence.  In fact, the only real existential threat humanity faces now is nuclear winter, which can only be caused by the massive nuclear arsenals held by those "well-intentioned giants" such as the United States.  If only Harris would put his attention to reducing this danger, then I would accept he is actually concerned with the fate of humanity, rather than the survival of Western culture above Muslim culture.

Despite its flaws, I very much appreciate the contribution Harris has made in writing The End of Faith.  We would all like a more rational world, and the book makes crystal clear that in order to get there, we must completely rethink what we mean by freedom of religion and freedom of conscience.  Only when religion can be criticized, like all other beliefs may be, can we throw off the final, lingering drag of the Dark Ages on human progress.

Book Review: The Grand Design, by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow

The Grand Design is a short affair, 200 small pages, or just four and a half hours for the audiobook, which is how I ingested it. It also doesn't present any new original work by Stephen Hawking or his co-author, Leonard Mlodinow. Nonetheless, I got a lot out of it, and would recommend it to other physics buffs. I think people who are not already familiar with the field will have a tough time making much sense of the book. So much material is crammed into this small package that you won't really get the full message unless you already know something about things like Classical vs. Quantum theories, The Standard Model of Particle Physics, and String Theory. However, I would recommend that people who might not be ready for the whole book could gain a lot from the first two or three chapters.

The book is basically a condensed history of physics. They cover everything, from the earliest recorded philosophers, through Newton's founding of something we would recognize as science, to today's active string theorists and LHC jockeys. For me, this breakneck-paced survey of thousands of years of human thought was very helpful in pointing out patterns of scientific activity, and how these patterns have changed over time. Again, I think I got a lot out of it because I already have a fairly deep appreciation of the significance of things like Maxwell's Equations and the history of astronomy. The Grand Design helped me understand more deeply how paradigm shifts occur, and what it looks like before the paradigm shifts. For instance, they spend some time talking about how when experiments failed to detect the ether, it took decades before most people stopped trying to "fix" the ether theory and began to look at the implications of the fact that electromagnetic waves can apparently travel through a vacuum (whatever that is).

The first three chapters can probably be understood by anyone, since they cover ancient history and mostly classical theories. The authors talk about many individual philosophers and scientists, the context in which they worked, the experiments or theories which made them famous. These people are not as well known as famous politicians, entertainers, and sports figures, but they should be. Reading this book and learning the names of the greats seems like the least we can do to thank them for making the discoveries which make it possible for you to be reading this now.

Quantum Theory is presented by spending a long time discussing the double slit experiment. This unsettling and versatile experiment involves a particle source, a wall which may have one or two slits in it, and a screen behind the wall which can detect where the particles hit. When both slits are open, and the particles are electrons, photons, and the like, a pattern of interference is found on the detector which "proves" that the particles are behaving as a wave. If you want to understand what this means, and what it is to "know" something, The Grand Design will do a good job of helping you get there. The thing that really blew my mind was hearing that the double-slit experiment has been done with buckyballs, which are 60-atom molecules of carbon. Even these relatively "large" objects showed interference patterns, even when shot one at a time with several seconds between shots. The particles interfere with themselves, because all of the possible paths the particle could take are visited simultaneously by the wave-like nature of the "particle". Trust me, this makes more sense when they explain it.

The double slit experiment is so strange, yet so compelling, that Hawking and Mlodninow's focus on it greatly increased my acceptance of the reality of quantum physics. It doesn't make it comprehensible, but it made it more acceptable for me. I think this acceptance will help a lot in the future of my study of physics.

I was a little disappointed that The Grand Design presented string theory and M-theory as the best candidates we have for a Theory of Everything, without even acknowledging, let alone addressing, the criticisms Lee Smolin levels at string theory in his book, The Trouble with Physics. If you haven't read this, you must immediately do so, if you care about phsyics, science, and education. The Grand Design doesn't even do much in the way of explaining string theory at all. So the first two-thirds of the book is really the part I'm recommending.

Overall, The Grand Design is much less technical than other general audience physics books I've read by authors such as Smolin, Roger Penrose, and Brian Greene. There is no math at all in The Grand Design, and very few diagrams. It's a good candidate for an audiobook.

Just as The Trouble with Physics got me interested in Variable Speed of Light Theories and Quantum Gravity, The Grand Design has spurred further interest in my mind, this time on the implicatioins of the Alternate Histories interpretation of quantum physics. The experiments described leave no room for doubt that spooky actions at a distance are not only possible, but are the law of the universe. And travel across space is not the only thing quantum effects can do. It's unescapable that we actually create the past by observing the present. What could that mean if we could understand and manipulate these forces? What implications does this have for ideas like the notion that we can cause good things to manifest in our lives by thinking about them? What do you think will happen when they try the double slit experiment with a virus? The Grand Design has inspired all sorts of remarkable thoughts in my mind, and I hope it will in yours too.

Look Who's Unelectable Now

The damning "unelectable" label has been most often applied to Rep Ron Paul, usually with no rational argument about why that label is appropriate.  Now that actual results from actual voters are starting to come in, we can test some of these proclamations about electability against reality.

Rick Santorum's last minute surge brought him to a virtual tie with Romney for first place  in the Iowa caucuses with about 24.5% of the vote each.  Ron Paul's third place finish, at about 21.5%, put him twice as close to the winners as to the fourth place finisher (Newt Gingrich at 13.3%).  Quite respectable, in any realistic accounting.  The only candidate who determined she was unelectable was Bachmann, who dropped out of the race after finishing sixth with only 5% of the vote.  If any of the lower-tier players weren't in this race, would their voters have gone for Romney?  Not likely in my opinion, except maybe the Newt supporters. While I believe Paul's showing legitimizes his campaign, Santorum's does not.  The reason is the same, and it's the very different results these two candidates are seeing in New Hampshire.  While Santorum's harping on the evils of gay sex may play well in Iowa, New Hampshire's "Live Free or Die" residents don't appreciate that kind of paternalistic government intrusion.  He is being heckled, jeered, and badgered by freedom-loving citizens across the state.  This type of unwanted attention would dog him on both coasts and in other liberal enclaves nationwide, should he go on to get the Republican nomination.  This baggage, not to mention Santorum's "Google Problem" make him very, very unlikely to prevail over Obama in the general election.

Dr. Paul, on the other hand, appeals quite strongly to the libertarian-minded, independent folks in New Hampshire.  If the Occupy Movement ever realizes how strongly Rep. Paul has supported their causes for decades, his appeal on the left could catapult him past Obama, who is being abandoned by principled liberals who supported him in 2008.  The fact is, Paul is to the left of Obama on war, civil liberties, and drug policy.  Paul voted against the bank bailouts, and opposes all corporate giveaways.  Due to the diversity of his message, Dr. Paul can appeal to people across the political spectrum.  This makes him eminently electable, compared to a one-sided conservative candidate like Santorum.

We'll see what happens on Tuesday, but I predict Paul finishing a close second behind Romney, cementing his status as a viable alternative to the painfully unlikable Mitt.  Santorum finishing a distant third or forth should take the wind out of his sails, though he may stick in for the long haul, hoping some good showings in very conservative states will give him the air of electability.  He will eventually be destroyed on Super Tuesday, when a variety of states vote, and the candidate with the broadest appeal has the advantage.

Only Romney and Paul can claim to have broad appeal, and I believe the latter has the best chance to beat Obama.  Romney is simply too similar to Obama to give anyone a good reason to switch.  Paul, on the other hand could legitimately capture the "Change" badge Obama won with in 2008, riding the wave of discontent of which the Occupy Movement is a symptom.

What War with Iran Might Look Like

President Obama and the Republican candidates who want to replace him talk a lot about how bad it would be if Iran got a nuclear weapon, and about how no options are off the table.  That last part is code for "we might bomb and invade your country, occupy it with our military, and install a friendly government, like we did in neighboring Iraq and Afghanistan."  The reason they say it in code is that they don't want you to think about what a war with Iran might look like.  Well, I've thought about it, and I'd like you to consider some of the possibilities.


First, some facts.  Iran's armed forces, called the most powerful in the Middle East by General John Abizaid, chief of U.S. Central Command, has launched no wars of choice in modern history, and its leadership adheres to a doctrine of "no first strike".   We outspend them almost 100-to-1, but we outspend everybody, and we're currently using that whole budget on other things, like stationing troops in Austrailia.  And since Iran has over 500,000 well-equiped troops, it would take a lot more U.S. troops to invade Iran than it took to invade battle-weary Iraq (peak = 157,800 U.S. troops in 2008).  Imagine the size and terrain of Alaska, and that's about the size and terrain of Iran.  It goes without saying that nobody in Iran would welcome U.S. troops as liberators, and resistance to an invasion would be widespread and vigorous even beyond the country's military.


Second, some assumptions.  I'm assuming a scenario where the U.S. invades Iran in a manner roughly similar to how it went in Iraq.  This seems a middle-of-the-road scenario falling between what we're doing now (sanctions, surveillance, and assassination), and nuking them back to the stone age.  Former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney has publicly recommended bombing Iran.


What's the worst that could happen if we attack Iran?

• War with Iran could bankrupt the United States.  Some argue we're already bankrupt, and with our national debt now greater than 100% of our GDP (a higher ratio of debt-to-GDP than Ireland or Portugal), they have a point.  The exact cost of the Iraq war is unknown, but estimates range between $1 trillion and $4 trillion dollars.  So if we use $2 trillion as an optimistic estimate for the cost to invade Iran, can the U.S. afford this?  Will we default on our debt, or merely inflate the U.S. dollar so that we can pay it off?  Hyperinflation anyone?
• We could reinstate the draft.  One reason the American public so blithely supports our Endless War State is that soldiering is seen as just another profession, a good opportunity for some young people.  But if kids with plenty of better things to do with their lives than shoot at foreigners and get their legs blown off start getting drafted, we could find ourselves in an ugly situation.  But once we start the invasion, a draft may be inevitable, since our culture forbids retreat.
• We could start World War III.  Would China, Russia, Syria, and the other Arab states sit idly by while the U.S. took over another country in the region?  Would somebody attack Israel in retaliation?  Given the state of tension in international relations generally, none of this seems "off the table".

I don't know if any of these things will actually happen, but neither do the pundits, generals, or politicians who say we must move against Iran.  They seem a little too willing to risk what seem like some pretty dire consequences, and for what?  To prevent another sovereign nation from getting a weapon that the U.S. has thousands of?  And seeing that the U.S. is the only country to have ever used an atomic weapon, who should the world be more worried about?


Our leaders live in a world that makes them think things like war with Iran might be a good idea.  You need to help bring them back down to earth.  The risks are just too great.  Tell Obama to stop antagonizing Iran and back off.  Contact your congressional representatives and tell them to rein in Mr. Peace Prize.  This might not do any good, but it's necessary that you express your views so they can't claim legitimacy.  And for best results, vote for the only Presidential candidate who explicitly advocates reducing our militarism and entering a foreign policy of Mutually Assured Respect.

The Meaning of the End of the Iraq War

President Obama has announced that the Iraq war is over in multiple speeches, but what does that really mean?  First, a few things that this occasion is NOT.

This is not an Obama accomplishment.  Candidate Obama said repeatedly in 2008 "I will immediately begin to remove our troops...we can remove all of them in 16 months."  So if he had kept this campaign promise, the war would have ended in May 2010, not December 2011.  More important than the pace of withdrawal, however, is the seldom noted fact that the reason troops are withdrawing is because the sovereign government of Iraq has demanded that we withdraw.  The agreement between our nations that dictates withdrawal of our combat troops by the end of this year was signed by President Bush.  Obama has worked hard to try to extend U.S. troop presence beyond the Bush agreement.  The only reason this effort failed is that the Iraqi government refused to indemnify U.S. troops against prosecution for war crimes, such as unauthorized murder of non-combatants.
 
This is not an end to hostilities.  The withdrawal of U.S. "combat troops" is a somewhat arbitrary distinction, since a substantial U.S. presence will remain in Iraq into 2012 and beyond.  Our embassy in Baghdad is the largest in the world, a $750 million complex the size of Vatican City.  The staff of this embassy has at least 5,000 mercenaries to guard them.  Do you think the people who have been battling our "combat troops" will see any distinction between them and our "security personnel"?  Those who feel upset that we invaded and occupied their country for 9 years will not rest until the U.S. presence in Iraq is completely obliterated.  Do you remember the crisis that ensued when militants in Iran took our embassy personnel hostage?  While that exact scenario can't happen while the State Department has such a large ground and air force, don't you think we're asking for trouble by staying there?  The need to protect our personnel means things like middle-of-the-night house raids will continue.  Do you think the teenager who witnesses his brother or father being taken away in such a raid will care whether the armed thugs conducting the raid report to the State Department rather than the Defense Department when he decides whether or not to become a terrorist?  If we really withdrew from the country, such a scenario could not happen.

The saddest part of this war ending is that mainstream news outlets feel compelled to "balance" their coverage of the war by describing both the good and the bad things that came from it.  This bogus "objectivity bias" prevents journalists from making overt value judgements, even though war is unequivocally bad by any rational moral standard.  The fact is that bias and judgement are unavoidable anytime a person opens his or her mouth or takes pen to paper.  Better to state your biases up front, rather than pretend you don't have any.  The Iraq war in particular was a miserable failure on any axis you'd care to measure: strategic, economic, political, moral and security.  If we had not attacked, would Sadaam have killed more of his own citizens than we did?  Iraq Body Count reports over 100,000 civilians were killed as a result of the U.S. invasion.  If we had pursued non-violent means for overthrowing Hussein, could we have brought about the Arab Spring years earlier?

The notion that doing evil things (like invading and occupying countries that have not attacked anyone) is OK when the United States does them is called "American Exceptionalism".  It is a dangerous attitude which often results in the citizens of this great country tolerating actions from our government that history will judge as symbols of American arrogance, recklessness, and stupidity.  That's not the kind of exceptionalism I'd like our nation to have.  At the Nuremberg Trials, where Nazi leaders were tried for their crimes, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert L. Jackson, the Chief U.S. Prosecutor, said "Our position is that no grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war".  I don't see why this principle doesn't still apply.  Iraq did not attack us (or threaten to attack us), they had nothing to do with 9/11, and they didn't harbor terrorists.  This means the invasion was an unnecessary, aggressive war. 

An unnecessary war, with its colossal cost in blood, treasure, and reputation, is not a cause for celebration, even when it ends.  The Iraq war is a terrible stain upon the American conscience, a blunder in all respects, and an act of embarrassing hubris from our leaders.  The only proper observance of the end of this chapter in U.S. imperialism is to apologize, withdraw completely from the sovereign country of Iraq (and the rest of the Middle East), take care of the veterans who lost their limbs and minds over there, and begin the grieving process. 

How to Win at Words with Friends

I play a lot of different opponents on Words with Friends and only two or three of them are equal or better than me.  Like most people, I prefer playing evenly matched competitions.  I can't really bear to re-match people who can't score at least 200 points on me, and I can't imagine it's fun for them to repeatedly lose by 100 or 200 points either.

I thought it might be fun and help people if I gave a few tips to help them score better.  There really are just a few rules of thumb that can make you score much, much higher.  You don't need a huge vocabulary, though of course that helps.

I don't advocate obstructionist playing.  I don't think you'd win much more often, and stuck boards are no fun to play on.  Given two similar-scoring words, I always play the move that's best for opening up the board.  Of course a super scoring word is worth blocking further development, but I try to avoid this.  Only with some of my more competitive matches will I try to avoid setting up my opponent for an easy triple word score.

If you follow only the Basic Tips, you'll start scoring much better and having more fun.  If you follow all of the strategies and actively develop your vocabulary, you'll start averaging 15-20 points or more per turn, and start playing 50, 60, and 70 point words with some regularity.

Andy's Tips for Winning at Words with Friends:

Basic Tips:

1.  Always try to make as many words per turn as possible.  This is the most important and least practiced strategy.  You can only lay tiles in one direction, but you can make words in the perpendicular direction by laying your tiles next to previously played tiles.  Any tiles you lay that appear in two words are counted twice, including any letter bonus.  (Tiles that were already on the board before you played are only counted once, and you don't get the letter bonus they may have carried when they were originally played).  Try to extend high-value existing words while playing your word in the perpendicular direction.  Actively seek out overlaps you can use to make three or four words per turn.
2. An 'S' is a very valuable tile to have, because you can use the above principle to pluralize a high-value word that's already on the board, in addition to whatever word(s) you can make with your other tiles that you lay with the 'S'.  Try to hold on to the 'S' until you can use it in this way.
3.  Unless the game's almost over, hold on to your high-value tiles (8 or above) until you can at least double or triple them.  For higher multipliers, see tip 7.
4.  I try to use everyday words when I play, because it's more enjoyable for me.  However, there are some special words that are so valuable in making those ridiculous 50-100 point words, it's crazy to not memorize them and use them.  And who enjoys being stuck with a 'Q' and no 'U'?  So if you use any special words at all, these are my suggested top seven to remember: Jo, Ka, Xi, Xu, Qi, Qat, and Za.  These can all be pluralized with an 'S'.

Advanced Tips:

5.  If you have a really crappy rack full of 1-point vowels, exchange most or all of them.  If you don't get high-value tiles, you generally can't win.  Getting zero for one turn is better than getting 5 points for four turns in a row.
6.  The Greek alphabet provides some gems that I sometimes use to make a great multi-word play.  For example: mu, nu, pi.  Click here for the whole list.  Just memorizing the ones with two- and three-letter names is sufficient.
7.  For ridiculous scoring words, you need to understand and exploit the compounding multiplier effect of the bonus squares.  Letter multiples (if any) are applied before the word multiplier (if any) is applied.  So a tile played on a triple letter square that's also in a word that's tripled is multiplied by 9.  Obviously, playing a higher-value tile on one of these squares can add up pretty quickly.  Even a four-point tile that's tripled twice adds 36 points to your word score.  There are also ample opportunities to multiply higher value tiles by 4, by playing them on a double letter square in a double word play.  These can result in pretty decent scores.  Also remember that if you can cover two double word bonus squares in a single play, your whole word will get multiplied by 4.  I generally plan most of my plays around some sort of combination of bonus squares.
8.  Note that if you use all seven tiles in a single play, you get a large bonus.  They don't say what it is, but I think it's 35 points.  This is fun, but it's hard.  The worst is when I can form a seven-letter word from my rack, but can't find a way to attach it to the board!
9.  Keep an eye on your vowel-consonant mix.  You'll be able to play longer words if you have roughly equal numbers of each.  So if you have too many of one type, play as many of them as you can on a turn.  It's worth it to accept a lower-scoring word if it helps you even out your vowel-consonant mix for the next turn.
10.  There's no penalty for trying out words that turn to be not acceptable words.  If you are unable to find a good play with words you know, you can try out a series of words that seem to generally follow the rules of English spelling.  You may be surprised what crazy sequences are accepted.


That's it!

It's Time to Decamp

The physical encampments of the Occupy Movement are going away.  City by city, for various just and unjust reasons, encampments are being dismantled.  Occupy Boston seeks to delay its eviction by proactively seeking a court injunction, but this activity is just sucking energy from the community that could be spent accomplishing our long-range goals.  The authorities will win, and most encampments will not survive the winter.  We can fight this losing battle all the way down to the bottom, whining about our first amendment rights until nobody is listening to us anymore.

Alternatively, we can accept the inevitable, and transform the movement into something more effective.  It was never really about the occupations.  Occupation is a tactic, a means to an end.  It turned out to be effective beyond our wildest dreams, changing the national conversation in a matter of months.  Now that we have everyone's attention, is occupation still a useful tactic, or should we pivot to something else?  Obviously I think occupation has outlived its usefulness and has become a distraction and a burden to the movement.  Now is the time to turn the corner, and choose new tactics.  Let's not fade away, let's transform.

The mainstream media will lose interest soon if we don't give them something new.  Pulling a "mic check" on a public figure's speech is an example of a brilliant new tactic that relies not at all on having a 24/7 public encampment nearby.  However, simply reproducing successful mic checks ad nauseum will not win the war either.  I believe the spirit of "Occupy Everywhere" will be composed of dozens of new tactics of this type, and many more we can't imagine.  And if the Occupy Movement continues to evolve, it will confound our enemies, giving them nothing solid to strike at.

For these reasons, I think the long-range strategic thinkers in the movement must come out actively in favor of decamping, rather than letting things devolve.  Acting in concert to change our tactics would be a show of strength, while letting encampments be evicted one-by-one will be seized upon by our enemies as a sign of weakness and failure.  We are living in dangerous times, and our survival is not guaranteed.  To maximize our chances of survival, we should constantly re-evaluate our tactics and encourage the movement to follow those that are most effective.  If we survive, we will win. To survive, we must adapt.  They say humans are good at adapting.  Let's prove it.