Life in Central America

Arithmomorphic vs dialectical thinking

Are people kind or cruel? The best reply to this kind of question is simply to say it is not a good question, because the concepts kind and cruel are not arithmomorphic, but dialectical.

Don’t leave me, hang in a little longer. You may find this kind of thinking is not as painful as you expect, you may even find it interesting, in spite of the big words. I am now reading a heavy volume entitled The Entropy Law and the Economic Process by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen. It is the perfect contrast to a novel I am listening to called The King of Torts, which I will review later.

When I scanned over Entropy Law, I was sure I made a mistake in buying it. It made my old brain tired just looking at it. Then I discovered, quite to my surprise, that it was quite readable. It’s never going to be a best seller, but it is considered a seminal work by some big brains. I will not dwell on the similarity between the words seminal and semen, but I don’t think I have to.

He starts off by saying: the boundaries of every science of fact are moving penumbras. And he contrasts this with pure logic where there are rigidly set and sharply drawn boundaries between symbols. We have ten fingers, for example, no one can argue with that. He calls these arithmomorphic concepts. Plato gets the credit for this type of thinking.

Hegel gets the credit for dialectical thinking, which is well-suited to dealing with things like good and evil, which have very fuzzy edges, and even worse, can sometimes be seen as one thing. But this logical inconsistency doesn’t make these concepts useless; it is actually part of their charm. The human mind has no trouble with them at all, and indeed cannot live without them.

And it has no trouble understanding the arithmomorphic world and the dialectical world at the same time. As you know, it ordinarily doesn’t bother to distinguish between them, which sometimes gets it into trouble. Consider the concept of democracy. This is not an arithmomorphic concept, and we can easily get into trouble by arguing that one country is more democratic than another. Dialectical ideas like this are surrounded by moving penumbras.

Breaking Iranian Codes

From Bruce Schneier's Crypto-Gram Newsletter

Ahmed Chalabi is accused of informing the Iranians that the U.S. had broken its intelligence codes. What exactly did the U.S. break? How could the Iranians verify Chalabi's claim, and what might they do about it?

To protect their secrets, Iranian intelligence -- like the leaders of all countries -- communicate in code. These aren't pencil-and-paper codes, but software-based encryption machines. The Iranians probably didn't build their own, but bought them from a company like the Swiss-owned Crypto AG. Some encryption machines protect telephone calls, others protect fax and Telex messages, and still others protect computer communications.

Whatever the methodology, this would be an enormous intelligence coup for the NSA. It was also a secret in itself. If the Iranians ever learned that the NSA was reading their messages, they would stop using the broken encryption machines, and the NSA's source of Iranian secrets would dry up. The secret that the NSA could read the Iranian secrets was more important than any specific Iranian secrets that the NSA could read.

The result was that the U.S. would often learn secrets they couldn't act upon, as action would give away their secret. During World War II, the Allies would go to great lengths to make sure the Germans never realized that their codes were broken. The Allies would learn about U-boat positions, but wouldn't bomb the U-boats until they spotted the U-boat by some other means...otherwise the Nazis might get suspicious.

And there are many stories of slip-ups. In 1986, after the bombing of a Berlin disco, then-President Reagan said that he had irrefutable evidence that Qadaffi was behind the attack. Libyan intelligence realized that their diplomatic codes were broken, and changed them. The result was an enormous setback for U.S. intelligence, all for just a slip of the tongue.

So now the NSA's secret is out. The Iranians have undoubtedly changed their encryption machines, and the NSA has lost its source of Iranian secrets. But little else is known. Who told Chalabi? Only a few people would know this important U.S. secret, and the snitch is certainly guilty of treason. Maybe Chalabi never knew, and never told the Iranians. Maybe the Iranians figured it out some other way, and they are pretending that Chalabi told them in order to protect some other intelligence source of theirs.

So maybe Chalabi's information is from 1992, and the Iranians changed their encryption machines a decade ago. Or maybe the NSA never broke the Iranian intelligence code, and this is all one huge bluff.

In this shadowy world of cat-and-mouse, it's hard to be sure of anything.

New American Elms

From Sturdy Old Survivor, a Hardier Elm Grows

Mr. Holloway believes — and others have confirmed — that this hardy survivor in Princeton Cemetery is the progenitor of a whole generation of disease-tolerant elms that growers have been shipping around the country for the last few years. His thesis is supported by tests conducted a few years ago that show that a significant sequence of the Princeton giant's DNA is an exact match with the trees planted along the entrance to Princeton.

Princeton Nursery Site

Check our their Princeton American Elm and Valley Forge American Elm.

Worms are good for your guts

Bowel cure that relies on impurities

The idea for this comes from US gastroenterologist Joel Weinstock of the University of Iowa, who believes modern man's bowel system is over-sanitised.

He noticed that Western countries have experienced a sharp rise in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) in the past 50 years.

That increase has coincided with a sharp fall in infections by classic intestinal parasites such as roundworm and human whipworms. In developing countries, on the other hand, these parasites are common, but IBD is very rare.

Weinstock believes our immune systems have evolved over millions of years to cope with the presence of such parasites and without them our bowels can become overactive.

This is where the pig whipworm (Trichuris suis) comes in.

Weinstock recruited a 100 volunteers with ulcerative colitis, and another 100 with Crohn's disease, both of which are incurable and potentially serious forms of IBD.

By regularly drinking a concoction of thousands of pig whipworm eggs, many of them saw symptoms, such as abdominal pain, bleeding and diarrhoea, disappear.

The European Agency for the Evaluation of Medicinal Products has now approved sales of the drink for public consumption, the New Scientist reports in next Saturday's issue.

The first product is likely to go on sale in May, with a twice-a-month treatment.

It will be sold under the name of "TSO" (for Trichuris Suis Ova), presumably because "Drinkable Pig Whipworms" may not be a smart branding strategy.