Letter to Trump

Dear Mr. Trump,

How can you call Hillary Clinton a liar when according to Politifact you lie over 70% of the time and she lies less than 30% of the time?   Don’t blame this inconvenient fact on the “liberal” media.  The world is not divided into only liberals and conservatives who buy the party line.  Unlike you, the geeks at fact-checking organizations are interested in the truth.

How can we not believe your female accusers when their charges portray the same man that you brag about being?  The respectable people that your victims confided in witnessed the anguish you caused, bolstering the likely veracity of their claims.  The fact that some other men behave deplorably does not absolve you.

Why do you call yourself a successful businessperson when you lost almost a billion dollars in a boom economy by making several unwise investments?  Through self-promotion, you gained celebrity status and used it lure investors into bad deals where you won and everyone else lost.  You routinely default on your financial obligations to small businesses and litigate against people that have offended you.  Ethical business people make deals that benefit all parties.  Will you be able as president to suppress your ego and represent the best interest of the United States?

How can you be trusted to make complex decisions when you do not solicit input from experts?  Solutions to modern-day problems require an informed leader who carefully weighs input from knowledgeable sources.  You treat your opinions as fact even when they contradict the evidence.  You state that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese government.  Nonsense.  Even a well-seasoned PhD physicist such as myself is unqualified to judge science outside my field without input from the experts.  My conclusion that anthropomorphic climate change is happening draws on my knowledge of science and the consilience of evidence in the climate science literature.  Do you plan to continue to spew uninformed opinions that go against the evidence?  Doing so as the most powerful world leader could jeopardize the existence of humanity.

How could you not have known that Russia had invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea?  When informed that Russia had already done so, you stated that it was your understanding that the people of Crimea rather be with Russia.  How would you react if Mexico annexed southern California because people there would rather be with Mexico?  Those with aspirations of being a world leader should be keenly aware of current events. 

 

Why do you bash the media?  The founding fathers so highly valued the need for a free and independent press that they elevated this principle to prominence by including it in the first amendment.  The media is an essential part of our democracy.  It informs our citizens and keeps politicians honest.  The media, which you so despise, has given you $3 billion dollars of free coverage, so do not complain when the facts investigators uncover are inconvenient.  Punishing the media would be an affront to the core principles of our democracy.

How can the elections be rigged?  A recent study showed only 30 cases of voter fraud out of a billion ballots cast.  You claimed, “People that have died 10 years ago are still voting,” and cited a report that found 1.8 million deceased people remain on voter registration rolls.  The fact that it takes time to remove people from the voting rolls does not mean that others are voting in their places.  In fact, studies show that such cases are extremely rare.  You also claim that “illegal immigrants are voting,” citing research from Old Dominion University.  The Harvard professor who manages the database says that this study misuses the data and that in fact very few undocumented residents are voting.  If such election fraud really existed, don’t you think that the offended party would be investigating?

How can we discount your behavior as indicative of an individual who is adept at self-promotion but shows contempt for the facts, takes pleasure in unsubstantiated conspiracy theories, refuses to accept criticism, acts impulsively, and lacks the nuanced thinking needed to make rational decisions?  Even if your ideology coincided with mine, a Trump presidency would terrify me.  Can you convince us that you have the temperament and wisdom to lead this country?  Your actions provide the strongest evidence that you do not.  Though you repeat how great things will be if elected, you have not outlined a plan to get us there, nor do you appear to have any new inspirational ideas.  Instead, you offer scapegoats and platitudes.

In my opinion, there is no evidence that you are fit to lead our nation.  Your inability to reason logically and your refusal to heed expert advice that contradicts your gut will be disastrous for our democracy and civilization.  However, if the people elect you, I will go along with the results and work towards proving me wrong in these assertions.

Sincerely,

Mark G. Kuzyk

I'm Depressed

There is so much to be depressed about.

ISIS (or ISIL), a group of religious fanatics, is marching through Syria and Iraq, beheading, crucifying, and killing all whose beliefs they find offensive.  Sadly, they are using hardware that the U.S. gave to the Iraqi army, whose soldiers fled when ISIS approached their positions. In the meantime, the U.S. is showing its impotence with air strikes that don't seem to be doing much.  Turkey is standing by idly as ISIL is taking over the border town of Kobane.  By the time we take serious action, it will be too late.

Israel's action on the Gaza Strip might have achieved its military objectives, but 2100 Palestinians were killed.  In recent interviews in the border regions, hatred between the Israelis and Palestinians is heating up, which will undoubtedly set the stage for future conflict.  During an interview of Palestinian school children, rockets flew overhead from Hamas positions.  They cheered, exclaiming that they hoped the missiles would hit the United States. 

Russia claims it is not supporting the rebels in Eastern Ukraine.  Remember those insignia-less soldiers driving unmarked military vehicles in Crimea who Putin claimed were not Russian?  They were.  Satellites clearly show tanks crossing the Russian border to Eastern Ukraine.  Igor Girkin, the self-proclaimed defense minister of the Donetsk People’s Republic, boasted about shooting down a plane on Russian social media before he knew it was a commercial airliner. Later, against all objective evidence, Putin claimed that the Ukrainian military had targeted the jet.  The rebels left the bodies to rot in the fields and prevented Dutch authorities from recovery operations.  The rebels, however, found the time to desecrate the bodies -- removing jewelry, rings and other valuables.

Putin continues to lie about Russia's involvement as the west allows this unjust war to rage.  The fighters are fired up by a vision of making a worldwide Slavic utopia.  Putin, who is clearly lying, is getting away with this farce, laughing at the impotence of the west, whose leaders care more about losing automotive contracts than they care about a new and dangerous Russia.  Putin is able to get away with his actions at home by controlling the press and firing playing on Russian nationalism.

If humans don't kill each other, Ebola has come on the scenes to finish the job.  This deadly disease

has found its way into Monrovia, with a metropolitan area of almost a million people with high population density, making it more likely that the virus will spread.  Based on the known numbers of infected individuals, the virus' incubation period, and transmission rates, the number of people estimated to contract Ebola in the next month exceeds the number of available beds.  Western aid in adding to facilities will not be enough.

Closer to home, a person who helped treat Thomas Eric Duncan (the first case diagnosed in the U.S.) may be the first person to contract the disease while in the United States. The health care worker is from Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital and tested positive on Saturday after reporting a low-grade fever Friday. The CDC is working to confirm the diagnosis.  Will an Ebola outbreak hit the U.S.?

Now that I have finished grading an exam and writing an NSF proposal, I can spend some time doing research, which will happily distract me from the ills of the world.

Good night...

The amazing world of numbers

The other day, I was trying to get straight the words for the numbers in Italian. While our counting system maintains a strict pattern, the words representing them are irregular. The exceptions to the regularity got me thinking about how number systems developed from primitive times. As a good scientist, I will first propose my hypothesis without looking at the history books, though I admit having some knowledge on the topic.

Consider the necessity of counting to the Shepard while letting his flock out into the field and needing to know if any are missing at the end of the day. The Sheppard added a stone to a pile for each sheep going out into the field and then removed a stone for each returning one. If a stone remained, the Shepard knew that a sheep had gone missing. In addition to being a practical counting technique, this procedure established the one-two-one correspondence between two sets of objects with the same number of elements. From a physicists point of view, one could say that this also established the principle of conservation of stones and conservation of sheep. Their numbers did not change, they just moved about from one location to another.

To solve the issue with proliferating sheep and shortages of stones, the Shepard recognized that he could use a different type of stone to represent, let's say 10, sheep. Thus, after the ninth stone was placed on the pile, the tenth sheep would be represented by the single 10-sheep stone while removing the previous nine. An extra stone would again represent each additional sheep until the 20th, at which point the next 10-sheep stone was used. Later, it became apparent that one need not use a special stone representing 10 sheep. Rather, one could place a stone in a different spot. Thus evolved the base 10 system, with separate symbols, or numerals representing one to ten, with these same numerals representing tens when placed in the tens spot, etc.

The "base" 10 number system most likely originated because of the ready availability of 10 fingers. I find it interesting that the word for finger and number shares the word "digit."

Other bases are also possible. When we were in Italy, I was at first puzzled at the system of Roman numerals engraved into the ancient buildings, which differ from what we commonly refer to as roman numerals today. For example, the modern form IV was represented as IIII and what we would recognizes as IX was written as VIIII. This even carried over to larger numbers, such as CD which they wrote as CCCC. Clearly, the original form of the Roman numeral system seemed to suggest base 5, as one would expect from counting on the fingers of one hand.

Now back to Italian. The pattern from zero to nine is as one would expect for base ten, with unique names corresponding to each numeral. Above dieci (ten), the system becomes schizophrenic. Undici (for eleven) seems to be saying one and ten, but quindici (for fifteen) is irregular in the sense that it is not a compound form of dieci and cinque (five). After Sedici (sixteen), the pattern reverses to diciassette, diciotto, diciannove, etc. Interestingly, the naming pattern for 20 and above continues along a strict convention without exception. Happily, 50 is cinquanta not quinquanta as I would have expected given the expression for 15. This pattern suggests an original base 16, or perhaps 15 with origins in the Roman base 5 system, which later got fixed to be consistent with base 10 convention. Whatever the case, the words hint at a mixture of systems.

Words and grammar can carry secret messages from the past. Ideas that were once imbedded in peoples' minds crept into language and became firmly rooted once it was formalized into written form. Thus, what remains today in any language language provides a snapshot of common usage from the past, which reflects the understanding of those times.

I was excited the morning that these ideas raced through my mind. I then thought about numbers in different languages. The words for the numbers in English are distinct until thirteen, which takes the form of three and ten, etc. Could this show the remnant of a base 12?. This seemed plausible, given the fact that some units of time (12 hours representing half a day and 12 months making a year) seem to have a preference for 12. And don't forget 12 inches to a foot.

I then rattled off the numbers in Ukrainian. It was purely base ten. I had taken French in high school and some in college, but my French got totally erased when I started to learn Italian (except for the time that French got mixed in with my Italian when I said to a French colleague while in Italy "qualchechosa," a hybrid of "qualcosa" (Italian) and "quelque chose" (French)). So, I asked my wife to remind me of how to count to twenty, and the pattern turns out to be the same as in Italian!

Stones may correspond to sheep, but how does one deal with fluids? This is an important quantity when bartering in liquids (as in ordering a beer). At some point, humans must have recognized that liquids are conserved. In other words, they can be moved around and split into smaller amounts, but when recombined, the quantity fills the original container in the same amount.

In the case of liquids and weights, there appears to be a preference for base 2, which makes sense given the ease with which we can split liquids in half over and over again. There are 2 cups to a pint, 2 pints to a quart, 2 quarts to a half gallon, and two half gallons to the gallon. Also, there are 8 ounces to a cup and a pint is 16 ounces (base 16!). And don't forget 16 ounces to a pound. The relationship between weight (or more precisely mass) and volume is clear. 16 ounces of water or beer weighs 16 ounces, or one pint weighs a pound. No wonder!

The birth of the decimal Metric System (base ten) coincided with the French Revolution, when two platinum standards representing the meter and the kilogram were deposited in the Archives de la République in Paris, on 22 June 1799. This was the first step in the development of the present International System of Units, in which the basic units of distance, mass, time and current are the meter, kilogram, second and ampere, respectively.

For convenience, modern day computers use binary, or base two: ones and zeros are easily representable with the gate of a transistor being on (1) or off (0). For programing convenience, the bits (binary digits) are combined into groups of 4 leading to a hexadecimal representation (base 16), where two hexadecimal "digits" can represent the numbers 0 through 255. As such, pairs of hexadecimal numerals are used to describe the alphabet (upper and lower case) the ten base 10 numerals, as well a bunch of special symbols.

The simple act of counting eventually led to the transformation of primitive society into one that can understand the mysteries of nature, which since antiquity had been thought incomprehensible in the absence of deities. Our language, on the other hand, provides clues of the thought processes that went into the development of counting, which forms the basis of mathematics, physics, the sciences, engineering and technology - historically following approximately that order.

After writing this post, I searched Wikipedia for additional information on various bases used by various civilizations in various eras. In the third millennium BCE, the Summarians used a base 60 numeral system, called the sexagesimal system. The symbols used are shown to the right. Incidentally, our system of 60 seconds to the minute and sixty minutes are -- you got it, base 60! But so are angular measurements. There are 60 arc minutes in a degree, and sixty arc seconds in an arc minute. This connection makes sense given that the timing of the sun's apparent motion in the sky is measured as a change in angle over a change in time period.

It is obvious how the base 5, 10, and 20 systems follow from counting with fingers and toes. Thus while the sexagesimal system is base 60, the symbols follow a base 10 pattern. However, an advantage of base 60 is that 60 has a large number of factors (1,2,3,4,5,... you can determine the rest) so that fractions are easier to represent.

According to the Wikipedia article on base 10, peoples using other bases are as follows:

• Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures such as the Maya used a base-20 system (using all twenty fingers and toes).
• The Babylonians used a combination of decimal with base 60.
• Many or all of the Chumashan languages originally used a base-4 counting system, in which the names for numbers were structured according to multiples of 4 and 16.
• Many languages use quinary number systems, including Gumatj, NunggubuyuKuurn Kopan Noot and Saraveca. Of these, Gumatj is the only true 5–25 language known, in which 25 is the higher group of 5.
• Some Nigerians use base-12 systems
• The Huli language of Papua New Guinea is reported to have base-15 numbers. Ngui means 15, ngui ki means 15×2 = 30, and ngui ngui means 15×15 = 225.
• Umbu-Ungu, also known as Kakoli, is reported to have base-24 numbers. Tokapu means 24, tokapu talu means 24×2 = 48, and tokapu tokapu means 24×24 = 576.
• Ngiti is reported to have a base-32 number system with base-4 cycles.

So, what became an innocent language lesson on the numbers led to a train of thought that occupied my mind for a morning and gave me the satisfaction of understanding something that was new to me. The fact that I had not learned something new to the world did not bother me a bit.

With all this numerology and talk of ancient number systems, am I worried about 2012? What do you think?

I am finishing this post after our traditional zillion-course Ukrainian Christmas dinner, followed by a glass of eggnog and countless chocolate-covered pretzels, so errors in my logic are undoubtedly plentiful. No apologies!

I wish all of you the best that the holiday season has to offer. Given the international nature of my handful of regular readers, I would be interested in hearing about how you form the words for the numbers in your native languages, and at what point if any, they are irregular. In the meantime, I will be sipping on another eggnog. Good night!