Nile Publishing Sale

That worked surprisingly well. Mara was free for three days around the new year.

I’m going to do another between Feb 1st and 2nd. If you know someone who might be interested, please let them know.

Ad Hominem Attacks 2

(Follow up to this)

I used the astronaut and the skeptic because it’s a simple analogy, but the problem with it is that to many people, the answer is extremely clear cut. I am one of these people. The Earth is just round, so arguments to the contrary make the business of evaluation difficult to separate from the evaluation itself. Asking questions like, ‘How do I know this is true?’ is the business of evaluation. ‘Is the Earth round or flat?’ is the argument itself. They’re not the same.

So let’s talk about the complete opposite example: Pons and Fleischmann. They claimed to have discovered cold fusion. They didn’t.

Let’s talk fusion.

E=mc^2, energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. In short, energy and mass are the same things, and they can be converted into each other via well-known processes.

Take it like 2 + 2 = 4. A 2 and another 2 are the same things as 4, provided the 2s are combined via a well known process, that being addition. Mass and energy can be converted into each other equally. It’s not the case that all uses of mass give energy any more than 2/2 equals 4. But if you do one of the appropriate processes, like addition, you can get 4 from combining a pair of 2s. Likewise if you do one of the right things, like fusion, you can get energy from mass.

You can also go the other way, but I’m not getting into that.

Suppose you’ve got some hydrogen. It’s the most common element in the Universe. Some of your hydrogen is Deuterium, hydrogen 2, with one proton and one neutron, and some of it is Tritium, hydrogen 3, with one proton and two neutrons. Ignore the rest. If you put one atom of each very close to each other, they will stick together forming helium 4 (2 protons and 2 neutrons) and a spare neutron. That neutron will go shooting off. You have completed fusion. It’s how the sun makes light and energy. We write this D + T -> He + n + g

The trick here is that an atom of helium plus a neutron is a little less massive than an atom each of D and T individually. What’s left? The g. The g is a gamma ray photon (you might have more than one). Gamma rays are massless. So the equation doesn’t balance in mass. For specificity’s sake:
D mass = 2.014u
T mass = 3.016u
He mass = 4.003u
n mass = 1.009u
g mass = 0

D+T = 5.030u
He + n = 5.012u
5.030 =|= 5.012u

There was more mass to begin with. Where did it go?

Well, some of it went into the gamma ray and the rest was converted to energy that binds the He together. Why does that happen?

Like charges repel. Two positively charged things, like protons, repel each other. When the two protons are pushed together, they push back, and to keep them together requires energy. That energy is the mass conversion.

With me? That’s vastly-oversimplified how fusion works.

Coincidentally, why do we care? Because hydrogen is the most common element in the universe, D and T are fairly easy to get, and there are no long-term radioactive byproducts except for the reactor. The outputs are Helium, which is inert and harmless in any normal concentration, a neutron, which decays into regular hydrogen in about 11 minutes, and a gamma ray, which is deadly by only lasts until it hits something. So in theory we could wrap the fusion reactor in a bunch of concrete, and it would be perfectly safe. There are no greenhouse gas products.

We would still have the reactor, and the secret of fission is that most nuclear waste isn’t the fuel, it’s the reactor. This is non-trivial, but people think they can solve it. Maybe. In an accident situation, say a tidal wave hits a reactor like what happened at Fukushima, it doesn’t seem like a meltdown is possible.

There are three ‘forms’ of fusion, and these terms regard how you do it. Hot fusion works by getting everything to a few million degrees. Hot atoms vibrate, so when a bunch of hot atoms are vibrating together, they may whack into each other hard enough to overcome the two protons repelling each other. This is how we think the Sun works. Muon-catalyzed fusion works in the extreme low temperature regime. It does work, but it doesn’t make energy because the energy required to do it is much greater than the energy you get out (the gamma rays). Cold fusion is what Pons and Fleischmann claimed to have discovered.

There’s also warm fusion and a few others, but they’re generally weird cases of the above.

Anyway, these two guys Pons and Fleischmann said they had created cold fusion and could do so whenever they wanted. Basically room temperature reactions, which are cold compared to the Sun, that produce evidence. They still have supporters today. They claimed they did it by putting water filled with the two forms of D and T in a tube with an electrode. They put voltage across the electrode. Allegedly, fusion then happened.

Pons and Fleischmann wouldn’t let anyone see their work. They wouldn’t let anyone examine their tubes. They wouldn’t share their electrodes. They claimed they had done fusion, but they wouldn’t duplicate the experiment where other people were watching, and they wouldn’t tell other people how to do it such that those other people could duplicate the experiment.

(When I worked at the patent office I had a rule. I won’t believe your perpetual motion machine exists unless I can look at it and take it apart. Unfortunately I worked in copiers, so I never had a perpetual motion machine application, but I still think it’s a good rule.)

So now we’ve got an astronaut and a skeptic situation. There is no way for the skeptic, me, to duplicate the astronaut’s claims. I think it’s all garbage. But I can’t prove it because I can’t attack the evidence. There is no evidence to be had!

Hence the Dangerous Play Fallacy, the assertion is invalid because there’s no way to interrogate it without another logical fallacy.

There’s a rabbit hole of quibbling here, the first item being that the reason the skeptic can’t go into space and look at the shape of the Earth is no fault of the astronaut’s. It’s economics, engineering, and so on. Whereas Pons and Fleischmann COULD have shared their data and just didn’t. That makes them the bad guys.

But that’s an ad hominem attack. Logically, there’s no reason someone has to share their data to be correct. I like Coca Cola, and they won’t tell me how to make it.

Come to Denver, have a beer, and we can argue this. We will not accomplish much other than running up a bar tab.

My Dangerous Play Fallacy is itself a manifestation of the common logical position that the one making the assertion shoulders the burden of proof.

However I said before I’m a scientist, not a philosopher, and more meaningfully, I’m an experimentalist. Why do I reject the Pons and Fleischmann theory when under similar circumstances I hew to the global Earth?

Because I can look at the Moon. I can do trig. I can stick sticks in the ground or stare at obelisks, and back calculate. All the other factors support the round-Earth. NOTHING hard and fast supports room temperature fusion under any methodology I’ve yet read. P&F’s cold temperature scheme had input energies on the order of eVs per atom. Nuclear binding energies, the amount of energy you would need to do something, are on the order of MILLIONS of eVs per atom. Yes, tunneling exists, but that’s an energy function as well. We know that function! It doesn’t yield the frequencies necessary!

The tunneling argument is absurd. I have a Subaru. I’ve taken it to about 120 mph on a track. With more straightaway, I could probably hit 140 before I hit the air resistance limit or blow my engine. The tunneling argument is like saying I could hit 10,000 miles per hour if I was just going downhill.

Yes, I might be able to go a little faster downhill, but not 10,000 mph. It ain’t happening. These are all known factors. 10,000 mph isn’t a possibility.

Ad Hominem Attacks

The classical logical fallacy of the ad hominem attack is attacking the person, not the argument.

This is one of the more complicated logical fallacies, because it’s valid sometimes. It’s valid because humans are not omniscient.

Suppose an astronaut and a skeptic are arguing. The astronaut says the Earth is round. The skeptic says that’s wrong. The astronaut says it isn’t because the astronaut has been in space and looked down, seeing the spherical shape. The skeptic calls the astronaut a liar.

The thing is, the astronaut’s argument is fundamentally an appeal to authority but may be valid. You can do trig on shadows or look at Moon pictures to ascertain the curvature of the Earth, but the validity of an argument is not impinged by other valid arguments, especially if they support the first argument. Regardless of other viable arguments, ‘I went to space and looked at the Earth, and it’s a ball’ is a powerful argument. That’s in effect the fundamental principle of science. One observed something and based conclusions on observations.

But the skeptic hasn’t been to space. Not too many people go to space yet. That’s not going to change soon. So the argument ‘I went to space and looked at the Earth’ is limited, and more trickily, it’s based on a hidden premise. ‘I’m not lying.’ The train of logic and inherent premise is the same for things like pictures or other data. Perhaps ‘lying’ isn’t the applicable word for deception, but deception exists. Bad observation exists. See Pons and Fleischmann.

So here we are. The skeptic cannot duplicate the astronaut’s round-Earth observation. Let us not quibble about fictional possibilities. For most people within the next ten years, going into space and looking at the curvature of the Earth isn’t a plausible option. But equally clearly someone merely making an observation, or claiming to make an observation, shouldn’t be taken as unassailable, even if the other party can’t necessarily duplicate it. Again, look at Pons and Fleischmann.

Pure logic constrains itself to absolutes, but often fails when applied real world phenomena. Look at Aristotle’s natural philosophy which is, in fact, wrong. Good logic, just wrong. And if you can’t interrogate the data or duplicate the experiment, then how do you evaluate the argument?

The skeptic must look at avenues of attack.

Can the data be forged? Maybe. An equally valid question is can the skeptic figure out every way in which the data could be forged?

But suppose that isn’t available. The astronaut doesn’t have pictures to look at. The astronaut just states something: I went to space and looked, and it’s round.

There’s really no avenue of attack other than attacking the speaker because the speaker hasn’t made anything available other than themselves.

Under the dangerous play rule, this is also an invalid assertion. If one posits something in such a fashion that the only path of interrogation is itself a logical fallacy, the posited assertion is itself a fallacy.

But people can’t do everything. I’m not going into space this week, and I have to be able to evaluate an argument about it. What’s more, I’m not omniscient, and therefore can’t base my decisions on knowing everything. Can I recognize every photoshop 100% of the time? Do I know enough virology to successfully attack a scientific paper with absolute certainty of catching all errors? No.

Recall that throughout most of human history, science was wrong. Kepler postulated heliocentrism in the early 1600s. Ancient Egyptians were doing astronomy thousands of years previously. Stonehenge matches up with astronomical observation to a high degree of accuracy and it was made millennia ago too. Same with American pyramids and Asian ones.

Heck, look directly at Kepler himself. His first book of cosmology Mysterium Cosmographicum just wasn’t right either.

Same thing happened with germ theory, successor to miasmas, and so on. How are we to know we’ve got it right now?

We don’t. See, that’s the difference between philosophy and science. Philosophy seeks truth. Science seeks accuracy. We don’t know if we’ve got it right, if we have the truth of cosmology, and we’re probably making some bad assumptions, but we do know how accurate our mapping of the world is, and we can measure that.

Tangent aside, how does the skeptic evaluate the astronaut’s argument?

Scientifically, the only thing one can do is use that assertion to make other tests. Travel around and look at the Moon. Observation of the apparent rotation of the Moon supports round-Earth theory is supported; observation contradicts flat-Earth theory. In effect, round-Earth theory is more accurate.

But what if you can’t do that right now either? Because you can’t travel. Due to, say, Covid.

Well, that’s a kicker.

The skeptic is back to evaluating the astronaut’s argument in a vacuum, and then the paths are ad hominem attack or blind acceptance.

All puns intentional.

Coincidentally, these are some of the trains of thought that make me a scientist, not a philosopher. I think seeking truth above all is an impossible mission. Seeking accuracy is fairly straightforward, though it would be unsatisfying to Lewis. A good counterargument is that working for an impossible mission is still a way of getting good progress if not perfection, but isn’t aiming for good progress not perfection effectively the same thing as seeking accuracy instead of truth?

I’m going to continue this tomorrow.

Fumes

I’ve got some wood glue curing behind me, and that stuff smells like headache.

On an EXTREMELY related note, it is really cold in Denver right now, and open windows or long walks outside are no fun.

Happy New Year, 2021

This year had good parts and bad parts. Let’s talk about the good ones.

I published my first full-length novel, Mara and the Trolls. I started writing it in the 2011-2012 timeframe, and it started appearing online in 2013. If you look at the copyright information, that’s where the 2013 comes from. Around 2017-2018 I started submitting it to publishing houses and agents, and got nothing. The places that advertise ‘we respond to all submissions!’ didn’t reply to mine. So be it.

I started editing it for real in late 2017 or early 2018, I forget when exactly. Initially I had mixed intents, either traditional publishing or self publishing, but as time went on, I decided the heck with it, I’m self publishing. I knew I could get that done on bile and determination alone, whereas with traditional publishing, my work was in someone else’s hands.

You can control inputs, not outputs. Having a traditionally published book is an output. Self publishing a book is an input.

Between 2016 and 2018 I was working at as an engineer at what was probably the best job I’ve ever had. I liked my boss, I liked my coworkers, I liked the work. The pay was good. I was miserable. I realized at the time that this was as good as an engineering job involving me working for someone else was going to get, and if I didn’t like this, it was my problem not the job. I still believe that. Bloodharvest and Mara were both close to completion, and it was just so easy not to do anything. I gave my boss two months notice (I really did like the guy) and set the company up for success as best I could. Then I moved to Denver. I finished Bloodharvest, published it, and learned basically how to do the deed.

In 2019, Mara evolved into her current form. I was in California when Ms. Fawkes sent me the second edits, and I realized the book was largely done. I got those edits around June, and over the next six, seven months finished. I hate editing. The ending was rewritten about 10 times. Other people went through it.

The artwork was done by Fergal O’Connor. He sent me scans in late 2019, and sent the originals to my permanent address outside DC. I’ve still never seen them. My living arrangements in Denver were not so good.

Mara went through copyediting and went to the layout people, and that took until around June 2020. It was published in collected form the first time on Amazon in June.

Within a month, it was down again. Misspellings, errors, duplicated words, and words that shouldn’t be there abounded. There were just problems. I’ve read a fair number of self-published books, and everyone who said they ‘didn’t need an editor or proofreader’ was wrong. Many wives and husbands, parents, boy- and girlfriends, and friends in general did editing pro bono. All the books needed more. I’d had the (professional) copyeditor and a parent go through the MS, but frankly, it just wasn’t enough. A lot of people touched the MS after the copyeditor, and I’m happy with her work. But Mara needed more professional help.

So two more proofreaders went through it, it got laid-out again, and republished in October and November as an ebook and paperback respectively. I was having problems in life, but Mara went live again.

If you do find a typo, please let me know, but I hope you don’t.

Total cost to me was about $10k, quitting my job, a fulltime year of my life, and a lot of questioning. BH cost about half that. Here we are.

In early 2020, mid-first-lockdown, I moved and started a PhD program at the University of Denver. I’m not enamored of DU but it is a good school. In 2011-2013 I did my Masters in Physics at George Mason, and that was not a good school. DU isn’t perfect, but I’ve got lab access here. I can work on projects. I can do research, and the faculty is helpful. A foot behind me a test apparatus is curing, and with a little luck I’ll be taking data within a week. I like it here.

Covid hit DU hard. It’s a challenge.

Through all that, 2020 happened. This was just a hell of a year, wasn’t it? I played very small parts in world events. A lot of people tell me they feel like side characters in their own lives. They talk about the USA as if it’s full of other people, the doings of roommates. They, and I, feel like we’re doing little. My part in the pandemic was little more than wearing a mask and avoiding family, and my role in politics, protests, and confrontation was no bigger. Yet in a country of 330 odd million (census is coming out soon), everyone’s small actions cause huge changes. We the bit characters are the players. We are drama before Thespis.

As a premise, I discount the notion Covid 19 was human caused. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and I haven’t seen it. But everything else was people being people, and the huge majority of those people were people like me, doing little things, not doing little things, struggling. People, little people, made up the events of this year. People cast the votes, took to the streets, and spoke their minds.

And the people who took the other side are people too. The people who voted against me have reasons they hold as seriously as mine. The people who refuse to wear a mask have reasons, and controlling their actions isn’t given to me. Nor is argument terribly useful.

Ever been on Twitter? Did you say anything? When someone told you ‘No, you’re wrong, you’re stupid, educate yourself,’ did it persuade you of anything? I suppose that’s fine if you’re playing to your base, but it’s not a useful thing to say if you’re trying to persuade others. If you want to do something with people, beating or arguing them into agreement just doesn’t work.

It doesn’t matter if it’s as objective as .. + .. = …. or subjective as ‘do you like this individual?’ You can’t force agreement. And if you’re right but you burn that bridge, that person will oppose you in every potential conflict forever more. Humans live 60-100 years on average. That’s a lot of future potential conflicts.

People are all of their past history projected at once. The present is a cutaway of our histories, laid out like geological sediment suddenly exposed by a fault. We see each other as we appear now, and yet we see ourselves as all of the moments we’ve ever been, drawn together into a line.

I’m still the little kid at Herndon Elementary, looking up at colorful posters on the walls. They hang signs on the walls at DU, and they’re eye level for an average person, so I look down at them. To me, I’m still that kid. And I’m me now. Recently I met a friend of mine I hadn’t seen in ten years. He didn’t recognize me.

2020 was a heck of a year.

Good luck, everyone. Happy New Years, and I’m rooting for you.

Mara

Mara is free on Kindle starting at 1201 am PST Dec 31, in about 1.5 hrs as of this writing. It will be free for 72 hours.

I’ve never done this before, but I think you get to keep it forever. So if you ‘buy’ it for zero dollars/euros, it’s permanently yours.

If you like it, please leave a review or stars.