Paradox Point

                 The James Brown Bill A Modest Proposal                On December 26, 2006, I was driving south on I-280, with my daughter in the back seat. We passed Colma, and the big flag there was at half-mast.              Over the noise of traffic, I called back to my daughter, “See that flag? It’s at half-mast; and that is in honor of someone who died recently. Now it happens that recently two well-known people died; Gerald Ford and James Brown. Gerald Ford was the President of the United States; an important politician; and James Brown was the Godfather of Soul; a great musician. Now the usual story is that the flag is at half-mast in honor of the President, and James Brown happened to die the previous day.  But as far as I am concerned, it is the other way around. That flag is at half-mast in honor of the Go...

             On Corporate Execution           A Modest Proposal             WHEREAS:           Under United States Federal Law, a Corporation is regarded as a Person,           AND WHEREAS:           Under United States Federal Law, Persons found guilty of committing certain heinous crimes may incur the penalty of death,           THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED:           That under United States Federal Law, Corporations found guilty of committing certain heinous crimes may incur the penalty of death.             Definition of Corporate Execution     ...

             Dry Wells in Science               This is a partial and messy list of dry wells, diversions, illusions, fantasies, follies and distractions in the history of science and its fiction.             Proof of Consistency of Complete Formalist Math           Laplacian Predictor           Clockwork World System           Straight-edge and compass constructions:                    Trisecting the angle                    Doubling the cube              ...

          Ask Dr. Psience (2)               Dear Dr. Psience:           What is the “Missing Mass”? Where has it gone off to?                    Signed, Lost in Space             Dear Lost in Space:           Cosmologists say that the universe will continue to expand forever unless it contains a critical density of matter. Observations show that the cosmic mass density is only 5% of that amount. Cosmologists, who like their theories neat, their questions answered and their cosmos closed, ask; where is the missing mass?           Parallel to this is one called the “Fermi Paradox”, named after Enrico Fe...

      On the Crime Shortage             I think that police brutality is caused by a crime shortage. Crime rates have been falling in America since the early 90s, despite wars, recessions, natural disasters and the W administration. I credit the banning of leaded gasoline 20 years earlier, in 1973. That stopped poisoning young brains, and twenty years later crime dropped, just as it did in every other country that banned leaded gas. In the 60s, conservatives blamed high crime on the ‘criminal element’, meaning blacks, the poor and dissidents; liberals blamed high crime on ‘root causes’, meaning insufficient nanny-state; and it turns out that both were right and both were wrong. The ‘root cause’ was indeed a ‘criminal element’, namely element 82, lead! Well, we tracked down that criminal element, and we’ve addressed the root cause, and we’re reaping the benefits; but the bloated police-and-prison state created in ...

The Welfare Matrix; a modest proposal             What becomes of society’s losers? Jared Diamond asked a similar question; what becomes of the losers of tribal warfare? He found three solutions. For sparcely-populated hunter-gatherer societies (politically-incorrectly called ‘savage’), the losers are driven off the land, to starvation or more marginal land or dispossessing someone else. For middling-density pre-state agricultural societies (‘barbarians’), the losers are exterminated, down to the last woman and child.   And for high-density state-dominated farming societies (‘empires’), the losers are enslaved.           These three solutions translate to the modern criminal code. The savage ‘Jacksonian’ solution is exile; the barbaric ‘Hitlerian’ solution is capital punishment; and the imperial ‘Pharaonic’ solution is imprisonment. But are these the only alternatives?  ...