Towering Giants

Towering Giants


By watching TV the viewer might get the impression that George Bush, Oprah, Paris Hilton, and the sports giant of the moment are leading figures in the development of mankind. It is imputed that they are worthy of objects adulation by the benighted millions. The reality is that they are passing glimpses of the trivial side of human existence and have no lasting impact. Our culture was created by people of greatness, the product of towering genius. They are towering because the few have had such a great impact on the many and genius because their achievements are so far out of reach of the common man that they require a measuring stick that is beyond our ability to measure.

Here are four figures of Towering Genius, in chronological order, that I consider most significant to our daily lives: Sir Isaac Newton, Carl Friedrich Gauss, Albert Einstein, and Ludwig von Mises. Their impact on modern life dwarfs those who shine in the sterile and pallid light of fleeting mass media celebrity

Isaac Newton was born a yeoman in England in 1642. He showed early signs of intellect and was sent to attend Cambridge University thanks to his mothers’ connections. While at Cambridge he invented the sciences of the Calculus, Optics, Mechanics and Gravitation, the core of physics, with little more than the power of his mind and whatever he could fabricate by his own hands. Newton single handedly brought mankind from the Age of Faith into the Age of Reason by proving that the scientific method can explain the natural world with far greater accuracy than acts of ancient faith.

Carl Friedrich Gauss was born the son of a stone mason in what is now Germany in 1777, one year after the American Revolution. Gauss also showed signs of genius at a young age by performing computations in his head while correcting his fathers’ payroll ledger when no one had taught him to count. His achievements in rigorous mathematical proof are the basis upon which all modern mathematics is founded. He invented the telegraph along with creating many techniques that are essential in modern physics and engineering. Non-Euclidean geometry, which he invented without publishing, is a leading topic in Cosmology on the structure and ultimate fate of the Universe.

Albert Einstein was born to a bourgeois family in 1879. He was a bright child, but did not display signs of genius until after his formal education. Between 1905 and 1915 he revolutionized physics with the quantum theory, special and general relativity. These theories have been proven true by a vast number of experiments conducted worldwide.

Einstein’s theories are so revolutionary because they broke the barrier between human intuition, human perception, and the underlying physical reality. Quantum theory because the world of the small (atomic scale and less) is vastly different from the macroscopic vista which human beings can perceive. Relativity broke another perceptual link between the world that we see, one of low mass and low velocity, with the actual Universe where mass increases with velocity, time is relative between observers, and the geometry of Space which is Gaussian, that is Non-Euclidean. The transistor, upon which digital electronic technology is based, was a direct result of the quantum theory, as is, nuclear weaponry. The Global Positioning System requires General Relativistic corrections for the mass of earth and sun for accuracy.

Ludwig von Mises was born in 1881 in what was then Austria-Hungary (now the Ukraine). It was a time of great upheaval in social ideology. The battlefront between socialist and classical liberal economic theory were forming between European countries that were embracing variations of each. His genius created two works that revolutionized the intellectual battlegrounds in this war. Socialism was published in 1922, just 5 years after the October Revolution that reverberated around the world. This book directly explained the how and why of the failure of this blight on human existence. He equated Socialism with death, accurately predicting the demise of 100 million souls that perished under Communism, which was socialism most fervid exponent.

In 1949 Human Action was published. This book used the power of deductive logic to provide a rigorous demonstration that the Austrian Theory of economics correctly describes human interplay in the market economy. Like the works of Newton, Gauss and Einstein, the impact of this work is immense and effects virtually all of humanity.

Modern governments throughout the world provide the framework for the prosperity of their citizens by the degree of their adherence to the principles of human action through economic activity that von Mises elucidated. Conversely the more these principles are refuted, ignored, or outlawed, the greater the poverty, misery and human degradation of that state’s subjects.

These scions of Towering Genius accomplishments will be felt by mankind for as long as it exists. They provide the foundation and framework of our modern society that allows billions via concerted human action to live safe, secure and prosperous lives. Most of us cannot fathom what is necessary for their creation but can only bathe in the products of their reflected glory.

Turn off the TV, and the false glorification of its’ trivial and sallow miscreants. You can join these noble souls, these intellectual giants in creating a more prosperous future for all of mankind. Bask in their glory for free at your public library.

Isaac Newton: Never at Rest

Carl Friedrich Gauss: Titan of Science

Albert Einstein: Subtle is the Lord

The Google Hypocrisy

The Google Hypocrisy


The word google is a verb, but it used to be a noun. It means “to search for information on the Internet, esp. using the Google search engine “according to Webster's New Millennium™ Dictionary of English, Preview Edition (v 0.9.6). It is also a publicly company traded company (NASDAQ: GOOG). They also have a nice and catchy corporate motto: Don’t Be Evil. Google represents the power of the Internet; a couple of graduate students go from obscurity to billionaires in just a few years (Larry Page and Sergey Brin). The question is why are they concerned with evil at the corporate level?

The basis of the Google search engine is simple and democratic. Web sites that are searched for, and then navigated to, through the Google search engine are stored and page rank is determined by the open and democratic system of voting by clicking through. This is an easy algorithm to subvert. Google cannot make users click through, it is a voluntary action. To subvert just type the URL presented and do not click through, and a page rank scoring event will not occur. The people at Google are counting on the laziness of users to not do this and click through instead. It’s a lot easier, and saves millions of lost man hours per year from typing in URL’s by the action of clicking through.

Google has also built a tremendous revenue stream from the model by becoming the dominant competitor in this market segment. The verb to Google has come into the contemporary lexicon. Many people develop the Google reflex; just hit the Google web site when you want to find something.

The free services Google offers, searching, web services, toolbar, gmail, froogle, to name a few and offer a great deal of utility for users based upon their algorithm and the faith advertisers place in it, thus providing the revenue stream. What is less clear is what they are doing with all of this data. Lots of privacy concerns have arisen from a variety of sources.

Hypocrisy has always been a concern for Americans. We have recognized that hypocrisy is often at the root of political misbehavior. This is embodied in the slogan the “don’t do as I do, do as I say”. It is toward this end that concern about the power of the Google search engine has arisen. Google has raised hackles around the world when they blackballed a firm (CNET) from the using their search engine after publishing results about the Google CEO using Google searches.

As a strident believer in free markets, I think this behavior is reasonable, even if it is poor public relations. The broader concern is that if they do this once, what is to prevent them from doing it again? Google is building the world’s largest private network graph of what is communicated to whom by whom, who searches for what, and who clicks through. If the eye seeks what the heart desires then Google has a window on user’s collective psyche. If you do not like this behavior, the simple solution is to not use their service which is, after all, voluntary. The market has the capability to take away their power.

Corporations are risk averse when it comes to endangering their revenue streams and profits. The Congressional record is littered with firms and their lobbyists seeking legislative relief from this danger. This is the territory where the free market becomes hindered by pubic interaction with private and powerful parties seeking the power of the state to provide preferential treatment.

The hypocrisy comes when the world largest search engine feels they have a legitimate right to search and index other people’s freely available information, but then denies that right to others. The hypocrisy is codified in their terms of service where they deny the right of automated queries to users, but the basis of their technology is automated queries of others’ data. This policy in and of itself, is meaningless, as it is not possible to make a manual search of Google, since it requires a computer interface to the Internet to accomplish this task. Most reasonable people would argue, beyond a reasonable doubt, that this is the essence of an automated query.

The days of anonymity on the Internet are largely gone. The technology, and its’ usage, renders this a nearly impossible task for the average user. Be warned that powerful and hypocritical corporate entities and their public sector friends may have interest in your data, which once recorded will be stored for a long time to come. Laws are fungible, data today is evidence tomorrow. This brings about the original question as to why they have a corporate motto “Don’t be evil.”  Shakespeare addressed this long ago in his saga about the wishy-washy Hamlet: "The lady doth protest too much, methinks."

About Our Oil Pool

About Our Oil Pool


I am confident that the President of the United States is an honest and good man. Fox News and Bill O’Reilly tell me so. He has invaded a sovereign country, Iraq, in order to protect and secure the life and liberty of American Citizens while conferring the principles of democracy onto the grateful Iraqi people. Let’s say, just for arguments sake that this is not true, and that he has occupied the country of Iraq because, as an oil man, he is covetous of their proven oil reserves and wants to have a military staging area should the Saudi oil reserves, conveniently located next door, be threatened by Al Qaeda, the Russians or anyone else he does not like. Just what is it that we are fighting for? How big is the Oil Pool? Where does it come from? Is it running dry? Is it worth fighting for?

According to oil industry sources, the commonly accepted proven reserves are 1.226 trillion barrels of oil. Just how much is this? Using established standards for volume we can convert barrels of oil into cubic miles. The number that I calculate is about 48 cubic miles of oil. Given that the volume of the earth is much, much larger (many billions of cubic miles), then this is really not that much. Maybe it is a good idea this occupation. Is oil really so scarce that the freedom of the western world depends upon trampling a few small countries who really do not know freedom and have no history of anything other than brutal dictatorship, for which our democracy will be a refreshing and welcomed change?

If we consider that the world is consuming a lot of oil, and that the consumption grows each and every year the key question becomes how long until we run out? I calculate this to be about 49 years at current consumption rates. These could actually be too low and we could be burning it faster than that.

The flaw in this argument is that every year we have more proven reserves at the end of the year than we did at the beginning, thanks to vigorous exploration and improved extraction technologies. This has been the consistent theme for as long as oil reserves have been calculated. There has never been a time that the oil industry has had less proven reserves at the beginning of the year than at the end, even with the intervening 365 days of consumption being factored in. Odd circumstances indeed for a scarce resource!

The natural production theory of oil says that crude oil results from the trapped decay products of living organisms which get trapped under the Earth and then percolate for millions of years at elevated temperature and pressure resulting in crude oil. This theory is so well accepted that the Oil Industry does not even fund the research into alternative theories, even though this one goes back to the 19th century. This always struck me as a bizarre and unlikely series of events, that deserts, fields and forests will get plowed under the earth and after millions of years become oil?

What about a larger scale source phenomena like Solar System formation? It is well known that there are copious amounts of methane in this Solar System. The gas giant planets of Jupiter and Saturn are proof of this. Methane is the most reduced form of a hydrocarbon possible and thus yields the highest energy content under oxidation (burning). Under the conventional theory oil forms as vegetable material becomes coal, which becomes petroleum, and finally natural gas as oxygen is removed and the molecules become more and more reduced.

According to Thomas Gold, this theory is wrong and he has some impressive figures with which to back up his ideas. Let’s do some calculations with his theory. If the outer 100 miles of the earth’s crust are biologically active as Gold suggests and the activity is uniformly distributed then there is a lot of potential oil to be found. If oil is just .001% of the volume of the outer 100 miles of crust, then we would have an additional 5,077,713,481,834,820 barrels of oil, or about 4000 times as much as the current proved reserves. If the oil zone goes deeper then we obviously have more. If the oil is being replenished from below via primordial reserves left over from solar system formation then a steady state might be expected in which extraction and replenishment would balance for a long time to come.

Perhaps this explains why we never seem to run out and some large oil fields continue to produce regardless of extraction rates? Some oil pools actually seem to be filling from below, which supports the deep hot biosphere theory of Thomas Gold.

Why then would the oil industry cry shortage in such a period of abundance? There is nothing like a perceived crisis to suspend rational thought and behavior. This happened during the seventies when stagflation ruled the day and we were running out of oil (again), in spite of the proven reserve facts. Since the 1960’s we have had four oil men as President and Vice-President (Johnson, Bush I, Bush II, and Cheney). What an odd coincidence? Is there any other industry as well represented at the top of the political heap?

If we are not running out of oil, just what are we doing in the Middle East? We are currently spending about $150 billion dollars per year defending about 350 billion barrels of oil of which we purchase about $12 billion dollars worth for imports. This is clearly a bad bargain. We could withdraw the troops and let the price of oil quadruple and still save money and lives, theirs and ours. Clearly no one is performing cost benefit analysis on this fiasco.

Back forgot my original thesis, it’s not about cost, it’s about freedom and no price is too great to pay to secure freedom for strangers who are unwilling to procure it on their own, especially when you are using other people’s money to procure it, which is, ultimately, what all tax dollars are.

Oil industry profits are an unrelated byproduct of this effort, as is the preponderance of oil industry executives as our leaders just a happy coincidence. However, if Thomas Gold is right, and as a physicist he has a good track record of being right, then this has all been a cruel sham and an expensive façade propping up a low profit margin commodity business through a sequence of artificial shortages and market interventions by government agencies. Current “expert” consumption rates indicate the pool will run dry this century, but if history is any guide at the end of this century there will be more proven reserves than at the beginning of the century (which was the case with the last one).