Antonio Banderas blames Bush

Yesterday, Banderas spoke to European media. He blamed Bush for the USA financial crisis. The only reason bearing that declaration is Bush' exaggerated liberalism. On the other hand, we may read an opposite point of view in the recent John Cornyn's pronouncement, asserting that Bill Clinton let his partner Rick Noriega advocate the financial abuse at Fannie Mae.


It is interesting to compare both statements, one blaming Republicans and the other Democrats. Antonio Banderas is a foreign actor meanwhile John Cornyn is the junior United States Senator from Texas. Banderas' accusation lacks foundation yet John Cornyn's seems to have a kind of line of reasoning.

What do you think would be Banderas role in Plato's Gorgias?

This is my point: Gorgias states that a performance (and Banderas is a good actor) is actually more convincing in front of an ignorant audience (Banderas' declaration was made offshore USA) than an expert, because mastery of the tools of persuasion (Hollywood) gives a man more firepower than mere facts (John Cornyn's statements).

You just think. And don't let Hollywood think for you.

Where is Science going?

Browsing Nature's blogs at network.nature.com/blogs/tags I got shocked. I've found these keywords at the top ranking:
# virology
# evolution
# microbiology
# genetics
# transplantation
Am I at biotechnology area? No, this is general science area.

In 1933 Albert Einstein and Max Planck (the grandfather of Quantum Physics) wrote a book entitled "Where is Science Going?". In that years science was a synonym of physics as stated in this book. First decades of 20th century science were flooded with quantum mechanics issues because this new discipline were going to touch the philosophical foundations of our world. Ontology and Epistemology were to be reviewed in depth.

Now a days, it seems Science has become a synonym for bioengineering. I am not saying biology but bioengineering. What are the reasons that cause that? Is bioengineering shaking the roots of our world, like quantum physics did a hundred years ago?

You just think about it for a second ...

A hundred years ago, physicists had the same economic handicaps to do science than any other scientists. Einstein's paycheck at Princeton was the same amount than Kurt Gödel. Of course, I exclude Oppenheimer in this ranking. Einstein and Gödel were doing Science. Oppi did Engineering. Quite different.

Current situation is that Bioengineering is a gold mine, but other scientific areas remain forgotten. AdWords statistics show us that one of the most profitable business currently is Cancer. In order to develop new techniques and treatments for Cancer, bioengineering is required. Far from being a philosophical event, Bioengineering rush in Science is a purely economical matter.

So, the question is: Should the greed rule the fate and future of Science?

Capitalism and Free Market

I have not a deep insight on Subprime mortgage crisis in the USA but I know another similar situation taking place in my country. This one is worst. It eventually (presumably next year) will drive my nation to a full economic collapse. I do not discard severe consequences, like riots, spoliations, or even a civil war. Of course, USA is not in this situation by far. Nevertheless, to study similarities between both crisis may be interesting.

A simplified version of the story is that speculative real estate business has led us to an unaffordable international endowment, besides inflation and unemployment. My country is suppose to be capitalist. Now that unemployment and poverty is coming, people is complaining about Capitalism.

Did Capitalism drive my country to full collapse? Is Capitalism a dangerous and unstable economic model?

Here is a point of view: my country has never known what a genuine Capitalist economical model is. It has been working for years in an intervened market system. Not intervened by government but by spurious particular interests.

Capitalism implies Free Market. In a free market, competence emerges spontaneously. Competence warrants fair prices. Speculation cannot coexist with fair prices. So, in conclusion, an authentic Capitalism is incompatible with Speculative Markets.

In this sad place, building costs per flat are around 30,000 US$, but selling prices are 10 times more expensive. If here you dare to build flats at a fair price, then you are going very soon to meet the Grim Reaper. Free market is nonexistent in a country where law is just a symbolic concept and speculation is the rule of thumb.

To everybody that blames Capitalism of the national bankruptcy, just think a second about the responsibility of the government to preserve Free Market.

CERN black hole

There is an alarm in news media about the risks involved in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment at CERN. People dreads LHC could create a black hole that eventually destroys the Earth. In that case, real estate inversions could devalue significantly, and that is a matter of concern.

Physicists assert there is no risk. Examining carefully the details of the process, certainly the risk is uncertain. LHC is going to collide two protons at high velocity and then study the particles remaining. These protons crash each other at an energy of 10^13 eV. Is that too much? Not too much if compared to cosmic rays, reaching peaks of energy up to 10^20 eV. That means that everyday Earth receives protons from outer space (cosmic rays) with energies up to 10 million times bigger. These protons collides with Earth, and nobody has ever detected the formation of a black hole nor any other dangerous thing.

So, our real estate assets are sure. Sure? Not sure. Because there is a point frequently forgotten: LHC is not going to collide two protons, but two packs of protons. Each pack carries 10^15 protons. Wow! That changes things!

Alarmism is for losers. Think about it. If CERN doesn't destroy the Earth everybody that told the contrary is going to be wrong and their prestige severely damaged. But if CERN finally creates a black hole, those people asserting it won't, will not have anything to regret for. So they always win.

But what about the sake of truth? Well, in that case, we have to be responsible and conscious. Let's remember Los Alamos big question before first test: "Could a nuclear explosion burn the atmosphere?". Now we know for certain it couldn't.

Next year we will know if CERN can create black holes. Or not?

Darwinism is slow

Darwinism is the best framework we have currently to undertake the problem of evolution of organisms, but it may be incomplete, not enough powerful. When trying to resolve an extremal problem in physics, for example finding minimum energy states, using computational approaches like Monte Carlo simulations, one thing comes evident: high-dimensional spaces are slow to explore. This is known as the "curse of dimensionality" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_dimensionality ).

Darwinism is an extremal multi-dimensional method to evolve the species. Dimension in Darwinism means every different possibility available to a life being to evolve. And that number is really huge in the simplest case of a cell even a virus. Nature has the advantage of time. It takes millions of years doing evolution steps. On the other hand, today supercomputers are crunching numbers for months or years as much (1 or 2) to solve one problem, but computers may complete cycles way fast (10 GFlops implies 1 cycle per nanosecond). So, I would say that natural selection counts with a power similar to current supercomputers. If natural selection did it (to evolve species), supercomputers should be able to do it. The fact is that currently huge-dimensional extremal problems cannot be resolved successfully no matter how powerful the supercomputer you use.

It is correct to say that Natural Selection is greatly improved by sex, because sex will upgrade an organism's offspring with the advances achieved by other congeners. So evolution is not just a blind random trial and error mechanism but a sex-oriented one. On the other hand supercomputers also have a "secret weapon" in this "nature vs engineering race". In the Monte Carlo algorithm an "Importance Sampling" or "Score" may be applied to accelerate the convergence of the process. This way, supercomputers may also be oriented to the solution as sex is helping Natural Selection. In other words and roughly speaking: Monte Carlo simulations and Natural Selection remains equally powerful, but Nature can do it meanwhile Supercomputers cannot.


In the above video ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCXzcPNsqGA ) we find artificial organisms created in a computer by natural selection processes. The point is these organisms live in a simplified universe, so their evolution space dimensionality is very low. In Nature, the evolution space dimensionality for just one cell is huge. So, Natural Selection works, yeah, but too slow for itself.

Conclusion: maybe some day scientists will realize that the Darwinist Natural Selection is not enough fast to explain life evolution. And here is exactly the point where Creationism makes sense.

Entelechy

As stated at Merriam Webster dictionary ( http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/entelechy ), Entelechy is a philosophical concept (concerning actualization ...) not still proof by science. Between Philosophy and Science there is a gap filled with Metaphysics. Entelechy should dwell in this area.

There is a kind of scientists called positivists that rejects every concept not verifiable directly through experiments. Positivism do not believe in Metaphysics nor Philosophy nor Entelechy. But not all scientists are positivists.

Diversity is vital to tackle unresolved problems. If we censor a point of view for a still unresolved problem we may be censoring the truth, and that is a jackass risk. In the USA culture we find two points of view when approaching the life evolution problem: Creationism and Darwinism. The existence of this diversity warrants an opportunity for the truth someday to be discovered.

In another democratic countries, like mine, things are different. Science diversity, Philosophical diversity and Religious diversity are not preserved. Here, the truth has less opportunities to survive.

Shame on my country. I look for the Entelechy definition in my official language dictionary. I find two definitions. First one is like Merrian Webster's. Second one is literally this quotation: "Not real". You heard it right, you read it right: "Not real". In my country an entelechy is an unreal thing. Shame on my country.

But that is not all. Watching TV in my country, we find public debates. In them, when someone wants to discredit another people argument, he utters: "that you said is an entelechy". So, current use of the word "entelechy" is an equivalent to the word "nonsense" or "idiocy".

Bottom line: my country's dictionary and public opinion are stating that:

1.- Metaphysics is a nonsense.
2.- Philosophy is a nonsense.
3.- Aristotle (Aristotle is who invented the concept entelechy) was stupid.
4.- Everybody in this country must be positivist.

Well, this is a scenario with no diversity, where truth has important difficulties to be taken into account.

In my country, creationism is such a nonsense as an entelechy. And that is funny, because it is precisely what Aristotle wanted to mean when he defined entelechy in its book "On the Soul" ("De Anima"). Aristotle metaphysics states that "the soul is the entelechy of the body". And that is what creationism claim: an aim, a goal, an intention, a purpose, an also called teleology, in the origin of life due to something called "soul".

Teaching Creationism in schools is a debate in USA, meanwhile it is an scandal in my country TV news: "Look at that Americans! Creationism in their schools! Are they out of their minds?". Shame on my totalitarian analphabetic country...

Prediction Euro-US$ exchange rate

Using a thermodynamic point of view, here you all have a prediction for the next five years of the evolution of US$ versus Euro. Thermodynamics has the power to neglect the subtleties of a problem and take into account the important forces that describe the dynamics of a very complex system. Predicting macroeconomic behavior in the international market is supposed to be a miracle. Nobody can do that and in no way can it be done.

Nevertheless here is the chart, and only time can say if it is correct or not. If so, an important theorem will be asserted; the theorem by which this prediction is based on. If, eventually, time proofs the correctness of the prediction and the theorem, the miracle of economic forecast will become science.



Thermoeconomics is a branch of Econophysics, referring to the special case of applying Thermodynamics to Economics. It is not difficult to understand the relation between thermodynamics and macroeconomics. Let's see: former thermodynamics studied the dynamics of gases. A gas is composed of atoms. The movement of a single atom may be changed by an external influence, the same way one stock may be bought or sell by an individual at a given moment. Both interferences alter the dynamics of respective systems: gas and finances. The alteration is thorough because in both cases affects to the whole system eventually. Every other atom position and velocity in the gas become different, once changed one particular atom status. The same happens in the economic field; every stock value later may be different after changing one given value, no matter how small or big it is this alteration. Nevertheless, macro variables remains exactly the same after the interference, in the gas and in the financial model. They both are not perturbed significantly by single actions at the micro-level. The macro-dynamics of both systems depends upon other forces, not upon atomic subtleties. You may learn more on the subject at "Statistical Physics and Economics" by Michael Schulz.

Democracy, Plato and the president of my country

It is known that Plato (The Republic, Book VI) did not approve democracy as the best way to govern a society. Nevertheless, now a days it is difficult to find people thinking something similar. Everybody loves democracy. I live in a declared democratic country: its president calls itself "red" meaning communist. At the same time he desires peace and freedom to everybody. History tells us two facts: 1.- Nobody up to now has ever experimented freedom in a communist country (otherwise, I dare you to give counterexamples). 2.- In the greatest holocaust mankind knows, 150 million assassinated people had suffered the communist concept of peace.

My country's president is a product of democracy. Plato warned us about this problem 2,500 years ago. He told us that democracy do not cast the most philosophical president, but the most rhetorical one. And that is exactly what we have here. Unfortunately rhetoric means lie, and philosophy implies truth.

Plato also asserted that "No one is more hated than he who speaks the truth", so I'd rather remain anonymous.