The Village Duck-Pond

Underneath one of the willow trees, one Winter...

The light

spills out

The Irony Age

Inside China, there are few critics of China's lukewarm approach to climate change. And that lukewarm approach has been used to criticize the recent climate strikers here in the UK. On the radio the other day someone was saying: "Why should we go out of our way to do even more here, when the UK produces only 1% of the world's CO2, while China produces 30%? What would be the point, when any good we achieved would be swallowed up by all that China is doing?" If we agreed with that reasoning, then China's apathy would have spread over here.

Whereas, we need to get those achievements. We need to encourage everyone to do more. And in fact, every little helps. There is a huge amount of CO2 already out there, and we are wondering about adding a little bit more. That little bit extra would make the most extreme weather a bit more extreme, a bit more common. Consequently it is likely to be the cause of a very bad event. Surely we should try to avoid that very bad event. So it really is worth not adding that little bit of CO2, even at some cost. It is not unlike the straw that breaks the camel's back.

It is also not unlike jogging. When you first try to jog it is new, but then it becomes a wearisome chore. Still, if you make that bit of effort each day (and I must admit that I never did), then it becomes a healthy habit (or so I imagine). We do need our defenses against climate change to become natural parts of our lives. Not unlike our defenses against plagues (which only developed after devastating plagues).

And after all, if we do not defend against climate change, then we will really want to scapegoat China. And competitive populism can lead to war.

Ironically, a nuclear Winter would reverse global warming.

Nice weather for ducks!

Rain finally, and 15 ducklings on the village duck-pond, even though it is Autumn!

Charity Schools

The Labour Party recently voted to redistribute the property of private schools to other schools, a proposal to reduce inequality that might make it into the manifesto for the next election in the form of, say, a pledge to end the charity-tax-status of private schools. However, the wealthiest parents already pay a lot of tax towards such things as general education (and the NHS) whilst paying for their own private education (and private health care). And what happens if private schools do lose their charitable tax status? As it is, the wealthiest people already have plenty of ways of avoiding paying tax. And the private schools might make up the difference by ending their scholarships to poorer pupils.

In a state of nature, parents educate their own children (the Baker children grow up in a bakery, naturally learning all about baking, and similarly for everyone else), with the children of the rich getting private tutors. Inevitably, each important extended family develops its own subculture. And eventually the important families feud. The Labour party is calling Eton and Harrow "feudal," but the idea of educating the children of the rich altogether (under the control of a national church, with a monastic ethos) is a way of reducing the kind of feuding that plagues many countries to this day (which is presumably why the posh private schools are called "public schools" in this country). After WWII, Labour reduced inequality with class mobility driven by better education for those from poorer backgrounds. But what if the consequence of that is a stupider working class (voting for Brexit and Boris) and a middle class full of people who are more interested in making money than morality?

The Labour party would say that that was not its fault: it wanted a different outcome. But would that not be like a gambler who lost all his money saying that it was not his fault because he wanted a different outcome.

And to prevent private schooling, you would have to stop people buying non-fiction books, so that you could only get them from public libraries. Otherwise, the children of the rich would grow up surrounded by their own private library. And you would have to stop people paying babysitters and tutors. You would also have to prevent people from sending their children abroad to get educated; indeed, since you cannot control what happens abroad, you would have to stop children from going abroad at all. And so on and so forth.

How to Turn Matter into Antimatter

1) Turn matter into electricity, using a nuclear power station.

2) Turn that electricity into light of a particular frequency.

3) Those photons decay into particle/antiparticle pairs.

Brexit, Boris and Statistics

In the 2016 Brexit referendum, only 38% of the electorate voted to leave the EU.

Over a third of the electorate voted to remain in the EU, while 28% did not bother to vote either way. The percentage voting to leave was higher than the percentage voting to remain, but this referendum was primarily a measure of the will of the people for a particular change, not a contest, despite the political rhetoric. And various factors made it a fairly poor measure, despite the high turnout. Some people, for example, treated it as an opportunity to deliver a protest vote, a vote for a more general change, by voting against both the Prime Minister and the status quo.

Did the 2016 results deliver a mandate for change? Should that Prime Minister have regarded Brexit as mandatory?

To see why not, you only have to consider the 28% who did not bother to vote, who were bothered neither by the status quo, nor by the thought of change. Did those people contribute to any such mandate? Hardly. To see why that matters, consider how big the vote had to be, for there to be a mandate. Had this been a matter that Parliament was indifferent about, then 38% (52% of the turnout) could have been good enough. Why not? But the people were asked, in that referendum, about a change that the majority of their democratically elected representatives did not want, and which the Prime Minister himself did not want. Had more than half of the electorate said that they did want that change, then perhaps their representatives should have taken that result to be mandatory, even if they did not think that Brexit was a good idea; why not? But, that was not what happened. What happened was that there was much talk of a mandate for Brexit, and a lot of other talk. What happened was politics.

All that politics was and is entirely appropriate, because it is up to our democratically elected representatives how to interpret such measures of the will of the people.

There were party manifesto commitments in the 2017 general election. But even those do not make Brexit mandatory, because people vote for a person, not a party, and the influence of a party manifesto on the average voter is arguably less than the influence of the showmanship of the leader of that party. Boris was not the leader of his party in 2017. He is now our Prime Minister, though; and he observes that there was nothing about a deal in the referendum question. As though that means that there was a mandate for Brexit whether deal or no-deal, or deal obtained by means of a threat of no-deal, or whatever. But there was never any such mandate, in the sense of something mandatory, for anything that Parliament did not want. Such a mandate does not trump the political rhetoric; talk of such a mandate is simply part of the political rhetoric. What should trump the rhetoric is logic and the facts, such as the fact that only 38% of the electorate expressed a desire for this rather democratically unpopular change.

Surely the people think that, when it comes to running the country, showmanship should be less important than the facts of the matter.

[Postscript: apparently not!]

What if there is a proof?

Even if a proof that there is a God is, as I believe it is, hidden beneath the foundations of modern mathematics, the experts will, I am sure, not want to waste their valuable time checking whether there is or not. But perhaps it would be different elsewhere.

And perhaps it could have been different. If Cantor's paradox is essentially a proof that there is a God, then anyone who could have noticed Cantor's generalized diagonal argument could have discovered that proof. And the paradox of Achilles and the tortoise is a reason to introduce infinite ordinal numbers; and Cantor did find his paradox by introducing infinite ordinal numbers. Could a similar paradox have been discovered by the mathematicians of the ancient world? Might that have been part of the motive for Plato's Form of Forms? It is too late to know now (although the experts would say that they do know that that is almost certainly not the case).

I wonder whether the work of Russell in the period 1901 to 1906 had any connection with Einstein's 1905 paper. Russell's obscure mathematics flew in the face of logic; and not too dissimilarly, Einstein's obscure mathematics survived being contradicted by empirical observations. And the powers of the world would presumably have liked to keep the truth about high energy physics secret. Still, it is for that reason impossible to know either way now (although the experts would say that they do know that that is almost certainly not the case).

Still, if God did create this universe in such a way that there was this proof, then we might expect the universe to be full of people taking themselves to be living in God's family. And if Einstein was wrong about the light-speed-limit, then that might make a difference to us.

Where have you been?

The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments.

That's from Shelley’s Adonais, 1821.