Remembrance Day in Kabul

Today we had a commemoration ceremony for Remembrance Day over at Camp Eggers.  In North Vancouver, where I'm from, it's always dismal and raining on Remembrance Day, which is apropos (but try telling the kids that).  Over here in Kabul, the temperature is definitely dropping, but it was a gorgeous day today.

A beautiful day in Kabul, in the foothills of the Kush Mountains.

The view from Le Bleu Cafe

The merchants at the local Afghan Market. 

Honey, do you want a pair of these?  The guy assures me he will give me "Special Deal"...

...because otherwise I'm bringing this home.

There was a large Canadian contingent--not surprising give that Canada has lost more soldiers per capita than any other nation fighting here (except for the Afghans of course, and their sacrifice shouldn't be forgotten either). We were represented by Major General Day, who presented the Canadian wreath.  Wreaths were also presented by the UK, Australia, New Zealand, France and Belgium.  

Afghan boys playing cricket in a derelict lot on the way to Eggers

The contingent at Eggers.  Beautiful day.  Note the flags at half-mast.

My young friend, engineer and Lieutenant Mike Ulloa.  A good egg.

My mate, Sargeant-Major Tim Ramsay of Nova Scotia, manning the Canada flag.  Exactly what you'd expect of  a SgtMaj:  Larger than life.  Likes to yell a lot.  Heart of gold.

This is why we came today.

The good Lord sent a gust of wind just at the right moment to billow the flags as we raised them to full mast.

Me and my buddies, Lt Ulloa (left) and SgtMaj Ramsey.  Thank you from Canada, boys!

A lonely toilet sitting outside Canada House.

The Americans also had a ceremony for their Veteran's Day.

American Veteran's Day Commemoration outside ISAF HQ

The table is set for the POWs and the soldiers who are MIA.

Anyways, everyone always offers up Flanders Field, which is indeed a wonderful poem.  But here's another obscure gen, from Pink Floyd's last album with Roger Waters.  The Gunner's Dream.  Going out to my friend Gunny, aka writer Sean Mac Uisdin.  You are hereby ordered to buy Sean's latest novella eBook "The Scarlet Bastards," available from Amazon.

The Gunner's Dream

     --  Roger Waters

Floating down through the clouds 

Memories come rushing up to meet me now. 

In the space between the heavens 

and in the corner of some foreign field 

I had a dream. 

I had a dream. 

Good-bye Max. 

Good-bye Ma. 

After the service when you're walking slowly to the car 

And the silver in her hair shines in the cold November air 

You hear the tolling bell 

And touch the silk in your lapel 

And as the tear drops rise to meet the comfort of the band 

You take her frail hand 

And hold on to the dream. 

A place to stay 

Enough to eat 

Somewhere old heroes shuffle safely down the street 

Where you can speak out loud 

About your doubts and fears 

And what's more no-one ever disappears 

You never hear their standard issue kicking in your door. 

You can relax on both sides of the tracks 

And maniacs don't blow holes in bandsmen by remote control 

And everyone has recourse to the law 

And no-one kills the children anymore. 

And no one kills the children anymore. 

Night after night 

Going round and round my brain 

His dream is driving me insane. 

In the corner of some foreign field 

The gunner sleeps tonight. 

What's done is done. 

We cannot just write off his final scene. 

Take heed of his dream. 

Take heed. 

Long May She Wave!

The Fridge Question and the Heat Death of the Universe

Housework is never completed, the chaos always lurks ready to encroach on any area left unweeded, a jungle filled with dirty pans and the roaring of giant stuffed toy animals turned savage. Terrible glass eyes.

     -- Pamela Zoline, "Heat Death of the Universe"

The question was:

You're in a perfectly insulated room.  No heat escapes.  You open the door of the fridge and leave it open. Does the room:

(a)    cool down

(b)    heat up

(c)    stay the same temperature.

Answer:

A fridge is a heat engine that pumps heat from a cold body to a warm body. This is backwards from how things happen naturally (where heat flows from a warm body out to the cooler air). To reverse entropy, we must apply external work, in the form of electricity driving a compressor and pump. If we could do this with 100% efficiency then the room would stay the same temperature. The fridge would cool at teh same rate the room heated.

But the second law states that there will always be irreversible losses that cannot do work for us. So some of the electrical energy will be lost as waste heat, instead of helping cool the fridge. The waste heat will raise the temperature in the room. So the answer is (c).

You are actually reversing entropy locally for a system (the fridge), but only by speeding it up by an even greater amount for the environment. So what that means is that every time you do work, say by picking a toy up off the ground and putting it on a shelf, you are accelerating the Heat Death of the Universe.  In case you needed another excuse not to clean up.

That man is the product of causes that had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins- all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand.  Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding dispair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.

                    --Bertrand Russel, 1903 

[consider] ... the view now held by most physicists, namely that the sun with all the planets will in time grow too cold for life, unless indeed some great body dashes into the sun and thus gives it fresh life--believing as I do that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he now is, it is an intolerable thought that he and all the other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress.

                    --Charles Darwin, 1876 

All right, a little break from thermodynamics next time. Maybe a little more on Afghanistan.

Entropy: What the Heck Is the Deal with That?

The human being is an organism that takes perfectly good food and manufactures it into crap.

    -- On a toilet stall wall somewhere at the University of British Columbia

So we covered the FIrst Law of Thermodynamics, concerning Energy.  The Second Law is Entropy.  Almost nobody knows what entropy is, including most scientists.  Brilliant physicist Max Planck referred to it as a "mathematical spook."  Mathematician John Neumann, advising a learned colleague on what to call a certain property he'd uncovered, said:

"You should call it entropy, because nobody knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage."

Even the guys who are supposed to know what entropy is don't know what entropy is.  It's that twisted.

Here is what entropy is. 

What's that squiggly thing before the Q?

I won't bother to explain it, I just like the way it looks.  Mathematics can be quite poetic; it can articulate profound concepts with the stroke of a few lines.  Like Joyce Kilmer should have said,

I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as is E

=mc².

The mathematical equation above is the most succinct definition, but here are some other definitions:

1.      Heat will not flow spontaneously from a cold object to a hot object.

2.      Any system which is free of external influences becomes more disordered with time. This disorder can be expressed in terms of the quantity called entropy.

3.      You cannot create a heat engine which extracts heat and converts it all to useful work.

4.      The total sum of information in the universe is diminishing to zero.

5.      Time’s arrow.

Entropy says that heat will flow from a hot body to a cold body, but not the other way around.  Simple enough.  Intuitive.  You pull muffins out of the oven and they cool down and the room heats up a bit. Every time.

But entropy is the only law in science that says that will happen. Theoretically, the air in the room could drop a few degrees and use that energy to cook your muffin batter while it is sitting on the counter. But that never happens.  Hot flows to cold, but cold does not flow to hot. It is not reversible.  Entropy, like time, only happens in one direction; it only increases.  Time is irreversible and entropy is a measure of irreversibility. 

If it weren't for entropy, we might not have a concept of time at all.  Fascinating--what began as a study of heat and work in engines leads us to an insight about time itself.

Or you can think of entropy, in a sense, as things moving from order to disorder. Think of the heat in the muffins as red checkers, and the cool in the room as black checkers.  After a while, when the room and the muffins are at the same temperature, the red checkers and black checkers are all mixed. up.  It'll take work to separate them again (by putting the muffins back in the oven, for example).

This is illustrated in many songs:

All you do, crumbles to the ground though we refuse to see (Kansas)

It falls apart (The Odds)

Everything turns to shit (Marilyn Manson)

So, while the First Law of Thermodynamics says you can't win (energy cannot be created), the Second Law says you can't even break even (entropy always increases; there will always be irreversible losses in a system; energy dissipates; order moves to disorder).  But, bless the dreamers out there, this has not slowed down the number of patents filed for such machines, and I refer the reader to  the Museum of Unworkable Devices to see some of these marvelous contraptions.  However, bowing to the Second Law, the United States Patent Office no longer accepts patents for perpetual motion machines unless you can show them a working model.

So energy is not destroyed (First Law) but, when used, it is always degraded (Second Law).  When we use energy it moves from high quality (low entropy, order, concentrated) to lower quality (higher entropy, disorder, dissipated).

Human beings, for example, take high quality energy (food), extract work from it (calories), and then expel lower quality energy (crap and waste heat).  We extract and use high quality energy from the environment in order to keep our metabolisms in an odered state (in order, if you will, to stave off the tide of entropy in our own bodies). 

As you'll see in the next column, it is not energy we are trying to conserve when we switch off the lights, but energy quality or Exergy.  And that produces some neat insights into how we can better interact with the environment around us, and perhaps even some clues to the nature and origin of life. 

I'll leave you with a riddle.  You're in a perfectly insulated room.  No heat escapes.  You open the door of the fridge and leave it open. Does the room:

(a)    cool down

(b)    heat up

(c)    stay the same temperature.

Think about it.  All you need to answer this is in today's post.  No consulting the Goggle Oracle! Answer tomorrow.

Why We Must Conserve Energy

Today I asked the Oracle of Google about why we must conserve energy.  A smattering of the response:

• In the Wake of the Gulf Oil Disaster, We Must Conserve Energy, 
• Do it all: U.S. must conserve energy in production boost 
• China Must Conserve Energy Or Pay Huge Price, 

To really understand why we have to conserve energy, an introduction to thermodynamics is necessary.

The first thing you have to know about thermodynamics is that it is completely whacked.  In school we used to say that most of the sciences were related, except for thermodynamics which mutated from another universe. 

 The laws of thermodynamics are based on heat experiments conducted by Carnot, Clausius and others in the early 19^th century. Thermodynamics, as its etymology implies, is the science of heat.  What is heat?  Heat is a measure of energy flow between two systems at different temperatures.  Pretty straightforward stuff, but it is amazing how profound the insights from these studies of heat have proven to be.

"Four score and seven years ago..."  Oops!  Wrong guy.
Rudolph Clausius

Let me give you an example of why undergrads flee at the very word Thermodynamics. There's four Laws of Thermodynamics:  The First, Second, Third and Zeroth Law. 

That's right. Zeroth.

Apparently just numbering them up from one would have been too easy.  Also keep in mind that the Second Law was actually discovered before the First Law, and the Zeroth Law was discovered after both of them.  I can't even remember what the Third Law is.  No, no; stick with me, I'm just getting warmed up here.  It gets worse.

The First Law of Thermodynamics you  have definitely heard of.  It’s called the Conservation of Energy (mass-energy, since Einstein, actually).  It states that energy can be neither created nor destroyed; it can only change forms.  Energy must be conserved.  Let's follow Ernest Enviroweenie and Dudley Dorkus:

Ernest Enviroweenie: 

The environment is going to pot, climate change is going to smite us big time, and we're running out of oil.  We have to conserve energy.

Dudley Dorkus: 

You mean we haven't been conserving energy?

Ernest Enviroweenie:

No, we've been wasting it. Do you realize that an incandescent bulb is just a heater that happens to emit 5% of its energy as light? Internal combustion engines operate with a measly efficiency of about 20% It's enormously wasteful.  That's not conserving energy.

Dudley:

Sure it is.  Energy is always conserved.  It's the First Law of Thermodynamics.  As a matter of fact, if you can find a way not to conserve energy, I'm willing to bet there's a Nobel Prize in it for you.

Ernest:

That's not what I meant.

Dudley:

Well, that's what you said.

Ernest: 

This is why you have no friends.

What Dudley is saying is that the First Law of Thermodynamics dictates that energy is conserved.  So, in the case of the light bulb, 100% of the energy going into the system is conserved. It goes in as electrical energy and it comes out transformed as light energy (5%) and infrared energy ("heat").  So all the energy is there, it's just that only 5% is the kind of energy we want in this case.  

In the case of a baseboard heater, electrical energy is converted to thermal energy (infrared radiation). In a fireplace, chemical energy is converted to heat and light.  In a nuclear reactor, nuclear energy is converted to electricity.  In an automobile chemical energy is converted to mechanical work and heat.  In none of these cases is one iota of energy lost.  Energy is conserved. 

So the First Law of Thermodynamics tells us:    

 (Don't tell your kids this yet, it'll just create problems with the teacher.)

So obviously we' re conserving energy.  We have too.  But what is Ernest Enviroweenie really seeking to conserve then?

Well actually, he wants to anti-conserve entropy.  I told you it was going to get worse.

We'll get into that one next time.

No Body

Perhaps a poem today. This one was actually originally published as a very short story in Quantum Genre in the Planet of the Arts (ed. V. Ulea, 2009), but I think I like it better as a poem.  It's actually where I used the word "Mindfingers" which, of course, became the name of this blog.  Stupid name.  Pretentious.  Anyway, enjoy.

NO BODY

No Body, I call me now.

No high-school sweethearts think of where I am now as they lie ruminating one night. 

No workers gossip about me in furtive morning coffee huddles.

No secret agent discusses my name with raised eyebrow on the sixth floor of a nondescript square building. 

Getzel Ternell, government clerk, bachelor, 35.

I whisper my existence in the urban cacophony.

I'm convinced I'm disappearing.

I slouch at the cluttered kitchen table with flimsy metal legs,

Pour cream into my coffee.

I consider patterns.  Patterns within patterns. 

Entropy is cream in an unstirred cup of coffee,

the tendrils of white softly curling,

each tendril producing smaller appendages and repeating itself over and over,

the intricacy staggering and beautiful. 

The design reminds me of a vast, leafless oak on a winter plain, or the ganglion net of a brain. 

Eventually the dancing back eddies of the cream coalesce, diffuse to mere colour, dead uniformity.

We are back eddies in the tide of entropy. 

I feel the psychic tendrils of others lose purchase as I immaterialize. 

Puzzled, their mindfingers search for me momentarily like the pseudopods of hungry amoebae. 

Humans are increasingly irrelevant. 

Their sounds are like the utterances of cattle, 

as if every word is spoken out of context from the one before it. 

I come to un-understand people, their reactions to given phenomena.

Time becomes distorted,

The waterfalls are languid as clouds,

the life spans of stars are cracks from dry wood in a campfire.

I am many places simultaneously. 

My edges have become fuzzy. 

Dust crawls at my feet, if it can be said that I have feet, if it can be said that there is dust.

This is how I see the humans now:

A vast beach stretching to three horizons

Seven billion bodies planted up to the neck in the sand,

Faces able only to see those close around them,

Behind them the jagged slow tide comes in to end them, one by one.

Do they scream?

No.  They sing.

They sing.

Ahead lies a fecund oblivion,

an abyss made out of everything. 

I can just about touch it. 

And here is the mystery: 

I can't reach it without letting go,

but once I let go, I lose all desire to reach.

Memorial for a Soldier

On October 30 I attended a commemoration for Master Corporal Byron Greff, 3^rd Battalion Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry out of Edmonchuk.  He's the young soldier who died in the recent vehicle-borne suicide bomb here in Kabul.  There were about 100 Canadians at the memorial, I guess. Mostly soldiers, but also a smattering of civilians like me.

Two things went through my mind during the commemoration.  First the sheer tragedy of it.  MCpl Greff, only 26, was just back from R&R where he attended the birth of his newborn baby daughter.  That's the only time that little girl will ever see her father.

Second, was the suddenness of it, the randomness.  There's likely nothing he or anyone else could have done, no training that could have prevented this.  There were, I believe, 17 people killed in that attack.  It could have been any one of us. 

You get used to your routine on base here--breakfast, work, gym, joking around--day in and day out, and it's easy to forget where you are.  Right in the middle of Afghanistan.

My buddy the Sergeant Major is a wise man. He asked me soon after I got here what made me come. I told him the money, because I tell everyone the money.  His usual grin disappeared from his face and he said, "Nobody's here for the money, man."  And he's right.  When something like this happens--a father taken from his children--the money doesn't mean a whole lot.  That won't get you through.  Duty and honour will.  Courage.  Not that I got any of those things, but maybe they'll rub off if I hang out with the solldiers long enough.  Maybe that's why I'm here--so that my kids might understand how important they are.  That those virtues are the reason we live in an oasis of serenity in North Vancouver, Canada.  It didn't just happen.

Remembrance Day is coming up. Sure going to feel different sitting in the thick of it.  I'm pretty proud to share it with a bunch of Canadian soldiers though. Spare a thought for MCpl Byron Greff and his family, and all the other Canadians soldiers.   I can vouch fo the fact that they are doing Canada proud over here.  

Is a fact, in fact, a fact?

I'm very interested in the climate change debate, not just as an environmental scientist, but also because of my abiding fascination with epistemology.  Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that deals with knowledge:  how do we know what we know; or how we know what we think we know; or how we think we know what we know.  You get the drift.

Nothing characterizes the debate over environmental issues more than the accusations that the other side is ignoring science.  Today for example, I typed "ignores science" into Google:

• Arkansas legislature ignores science, mandates toxic fluoridation for entire state
• Government's badger-culling plan "ignores science"
• DeGette Embryonic Stem Cell Research Bill Ignores Science

In the climate change arena, you have on one side the combined weight of virtually every scientist conducting research in a relevant field stating with a high degree of probability that global warming will likely be quite nasty for future generations.  And you have on the other side a collective "Pshaw!"  What is fascinating to me is the enormous success the Pshaw! side is having.  They have basically managed the climate change file off the top ten list of government policy.

People agitating to do something about climate change are somewhere between puzzled and livid.  They double-down:  "Very well then, we'll do even more research, and present them with even more facts, with even more certainty. That'll learn 'em!"  But, of course it doesn't.

This is because facts are vastly overrated.  It's one of our enduring illusions that we, humans, are rational beings. 

Look at addicts--their worlds can be collapsing around them, but they will all steadfastly maintain that their addiction is not a factor.  We view this behavior as pathological, but all of us, I think, in our minds, build these elaborate labyrinths of mirrors and glass so that we simply don't see what we don’t want to see.  We're all, untimately, prisoners of our own biases.

René des Cartes, the founder of modern philosophy, sought to unshackle himself from those bonds of bias.  His primary motivation for his seminal work Meditations on First Philosophy was to find a single,  irrefutable fact.  His epiphany, perhaps the most famous one-liner in philosophy, was Cogito, ergo sum.  I think therefore I am.  But of course, people refuted it.

Even the word itself--fact--is suspicious. What is the difference between "I am in Kabul" and "It is a fact that I am in Kabul"?  They both say the same thing; the second just emphasizes the point by appealing to truth, to the set of Things That Are Real.  Therefore, preceding a statement with "It is a fact that..." is not a logical argument, but a rhetorical one.  I don't go around saying "It is a fact that my name is Adam" because I don't need  to persuade people to believe it.  "I am Adam" suffices.

And there are virtually an infinite number of facts from which to choose, so the selection of even perfectly "objective" facts (if there were such an animal) itself becomes subjective.  Even if it's the same fact.  For instance one person says that 99% of all UFO reports are proven false, and another says that 1% of UFO sightings cannot be explained. 

Science actually has a way around this. Scientists tend to use the term "observation" instead of fact.  Instead of "It is a fact that it is raining" they say "I observe that it is raining."  So they move out of the "objective reality" of a fact to the "subjective perception" of the observer.

So hammering the so-called deniers over the head with facts is ultimately futile, in our post-objective world.  The main reason the skeptics deny climate change is because it challenges values.  And facts may be transient, but beliefs and values are not.  They are bedrock, baby. 

The deniers are almost exclusively on the political right--that's telling right there.  What the so-called deniers are denying is not climate change itself but the implied policy remedies to climate change--one-world government; international regulation of capital; centrally planned wealth distribution; unrepresentative technocracy.  These things are all more threatening to many than some potential nastiness with the weather fifty years down the road.

If you want to get somewhere, start the discussion with values, not facts. And state the way you see things as observations instead of facts.   But I grow weary.  More of this another day.