In Memoriam – 2006

This blog is too infrequent to have many traditions. The following is my only annual one. It's the third time I've had to update it.

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I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.

— John Adams (1735-1826)

As a theoretical physicist with major metaphysical leanings, I've long felt the above quote by President Adams to be especially pertinent to me personally. Therefore, to the many who have made the sacrifice to study the ugly side of life so that others may study the beautiful side, I offer my humblest thanks.

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And there have been so many…

War/Conflict	Personnel Served	Battle Deaths	Other Deaths	Wounds Not Mortal
World War I (1917-1918)	4,734,991	53,402	63,114	204,002*
World War II (1941-1946)	16,112,566	291,557	113,842	671,846*
Korean War (1950-1953)	5,720,000	33,741	2,835	103,284
Vietnam Conflict (1964-1973)	8,744,000	47,415	10,785	153,303
Persian Gulf War (1990-1991)	2,225,000	147	235	467

* See reference notes below for sources of these figures.  Note that World War I "Wounds Not Mortal" as well as the Marine Corps contribution to WWII "Wounds Not Mortal" (68,207 of the 671,846) are actually "Wounded In Action" (i.e., number of soldiers wounded) and technically not "Wounds Not Mortal" (of which one soldier could receive multiple ones during his tour of duty, of course).

US Casualties Suffered in Major Ongoing Operations**

[For comparison, bracketed figures give the DoD official totals as they stood last year on Memorial Day 2004, which reflected casualties up through May 27, 2005 10 AM EST.]

Operation	Killed in Action	Nonhostile Deaths	Wounded In Action
Enduring Freedom (Sep 2001-present)	145 [75]	147 [112]	743 [470]
Iraqi Freedom (Mar 2003-present)	1945 [1264]	522 [383]	18,184 [12,630]

** This year's figures current as of May 30, 2006, 10 AM EDT. See reference notes below.

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Notes and References for the Tables:

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For 1st Table:
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Source: U.S. Department of Defense, Directorate for Information Operations and Reports, Statistical Information and Analysis Division. "DoD Principal Wars – US Military Personnel Serving and Casualties"

All names used (notably, "Vietnam Conflict" and "Persian Gulf War") as well as all years chosen for tabulation (notably, including 1946 casualties in "World War II" and including only 1964-1973 casualties in the "Vietnam Conflict") are those used by the Department of Defense in the above source.

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For 2nd Table:
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Source: The most recent (which, in this case, was May 30, 2006 10 AM EST) "Casualty Reports" link of www.defenselink.mil, the official web portal to all of the public US Department of Defense websites. Note that the Casualty Reports link is regularly updated and the most current one can always be found at the bottom of the "Press Resources" linklist in the right column of www.defenselink.mil.

NB: A useful general source for all military casualties from all US military engangements is the "Military Casualty Information" webpage of U.S. Department of Defense, Directorate for Information Operations and Reports, Statistical Information and Analysis Division. The “DoD Personnel & Procurement Statistics” page of the Statistical Information and Analysis Division has a wealth of information on many other topics too.

Whiteboard of the Week

Lately, I've been loathe to blog out of fear that it'll lead too much procrastination (which would be especially bad since I think the "just right" level of procrastination is roughly a 40 hour a week job in and of itself).

So, in an effort to make sure this blog promotes rather than detracts from my research efficiency, I'm instituting the following feature seen elsewhere around the web, The Whiteboard of the Week. Not only will it me encourage me to produce at least one tangible piece of evidence a week that I've done work, but also it will encourage me to clean up my messy whiteboard writing.

This week I'm focusing on TAing MIT's introductory solid state physics course for first-year electrical engineering grad students, and thus my office whiteboard today looked like this.

(Click picture for full 1024 x 768 JPEG)

This cut a little too close to the bone.

Somehow I forgot this bon mot from The Simpsons:

BART: Look at me, I'm a grad student!   I'm 30, and I made $600 last year.

MARGE: Bart, don't make fun of grad students.   They just made a terrible life choice.

(I'm just kidding.  MIT is the Happiest Place on Earth^TM… or at least it will be once the legal conflicts with Disney are settled.)

Looking once again at the horrors of the world…

So now that this blog's been reincarnated, I suppose I should post something. My normal bloggy habits were to read or see something horrible, become obsessively aggravated by it, procrastinate tremendously on my real work by doing an absurd amount on research on it, and then finally write a post that usually included just a teeny-tiny fraction of all that obsessive work. (Did ya check out the references on the bottom of my Hiroshima and Nagasaki post? I really went out and looked for just the right table in the US Strategic Bombing Survey. I have Excel analysis of it—cross-referenced against Morris's Fog of War documentary to boot—that I didn't include since, well, that'd just make y'all think I'm clinically obsessive. )

Thus, I think this time around I should actively try to check this habit or, failing that, at least try to keep it to manageable proportions. So this post is about a teeny-tiny horrible thing, rather than a world-historical horrible thing. But, man, it's horrible in its own special way…

Migration.

After about 9 months of not posting, I doubt I still have any regular readers.   But for those of you who know me from

http://williamkaminsky.typepad.com

welcome to the new WordPress version.   Since the frequency of my posts over the last year (i.e., near zero) doesn't really warrant a paid subscription blog service like TypePad, I imagine I'll be closing the old TypePad version relatively soon and moving exclusively to this WordPress site.   Thus, for all you who've been kind enough to link to me in the past, please update the link to:

http://williamkaminsky.wordpress.com

And now for some much needed procrastination…

For all you regular readers wondering about the sharp falloff in postings of late, it was sadly necessitated by my need to do my actual PhD work in quantum computation, namely my thesis proposal and oral exams.   Happily, they’re all done now, and I thus may now pursue some much-needed procrastination.   

First on deck is this election thingy that happened about a month ago and its many alleged irregularities. 

Stay tuned.

“I ain’t sayin’ I beat the devil, but I drank his beer for nothing. Then I stole his song.”

Over the last few months, I’ve been writing less and less on this blog. While several bloggers I read and respect were kind enough to read my blog and occassionally grace it with their comments and while there were a few times that well-known blogs linked to me and thus temporarily bumped my daily readership into the high hundreds or low thousands, there didn’t seem to be much point.

And thus, over the last 6 weeks or so, I wrote nothing.

Fortunately, I then had one of those bolts of inspiration that come from the direction you least expect. Namely, I heard Johnny Cash’s rendition of the following song Kris Kristofferson wrote as a tribute to him.

It’s set me straight.

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Beat the Devil (1970)
by Kris Kristofferson

It was winter time in Nashville, down on music row.
And I was lookin’ for a place to get myself out of the cold.
To warm the frozen feelin’ that was eatin’ at my soul.
And keep the chilly wind off me and my guitar.

Well, my thirsty wanted whiskey, and my hungry needed beans,
But it’d been of month of paydays since I’d heard that eagle scream.
So with a stomach full of empty and a pocket full of dreams,
I left my pride and stepped inside a bar.

Actually, I guess you’d could call it a tavern.
Cigarette smoke to the ceiling.
Sawdust on the floor. Friendly shadows.

I saw that there was just one old man sittin’ at the bar.
And in the mirror I could see him checkin’ me and my guitar.
And he turned and said: “Come up here boy, and show us what you are.”
I said: “I’m dry.”
He bought me a beer.

Then he nodded at my guitar and said: “It’s a tough life, ain’t it?”
I just looked at him, and he said: “You ain’t makin’ any money, are you?”
I said: “You’ve been readin’ my mail.”
He just smiled and said: “Let me see that guitar. I’ve got something you oughta hear.”
Then he laid it on my ear:

“If you waste your time a-talkin’ to the people who don’t listen,
To the things that you are sayin’, who do you think’s gonna hear?
And if you should die explainin’ how the things that they complain about,
Are things they could be changin’, who do you think’s gonna care?

There were other lonely singers in a world turned deaf and blind,
Who were crucified for what they tried to show.
And their voices have been scattered by the swirling winds of time.
For the truth remains that no one wants to know.”

Well, the old man was a stranger, but I’d heard his song before,
Back when failure had me locked out on the wrong side of the door.
When no one stood behind me but my shadow on the floor,
And lonesome was more than a state of mind.

You see, the devil haunts a hungry man,
And if you don’t wanna join him, well, you got to beat him.

I ain’t sayin’ I beat the devil,
but I drank his beer for nothing.
Then I stole his song:

“And you still can hear me singin’ to the people who don’t listen,
To the things that I am sayin’, prayin’ someone’s gonna hear.
And I guess I’ll die explaining how the things that they complain about,
Are things they could be changin’, hopin’ someone’s gonna care.

I was born a lonely singer, and I’m bound to die the same,
But I’ve got to feed the hunger in my soul.
And if I never have a nickel, I won’t ever die ashamed.
‘Cause I don’t believe that no one wants to know.”

I’m Procrastinating for Good Reasons… Really.

Avid readers of this blog (and the good folks at www.sitemeter.com seem to imply that there’s a handful of you beyond my own family) might have noticed a falloff in my posting frequency in the last 2 months or so.

I assure you all that I’m procrastinating for good reasons… really… such as staying up to obscenely late hours to watch NBC’s pathetically short snippets of Massachusetts’s own Jimmy Pedro winning the bronze in the 73kg Judo event.

But seriously, I’m actually working on my thesis proposal… and so I’m procrastinating on my procrastination to do work. Strange, but true. [Rest assured that all such vocational progress is slow and grudging. ]

Thus, I sincerely apologize to any in the Blogosphere who’ve been waiting with bated breath for me to tie up any of this blog’s many loose ends, be they the conclusions of my “Meeting Joe Wilson” series, a promised series on the book Imperial Hubris by Michael Scheuer (the author formerly known as “Anonymous”), or worse, my long-languishing series “The Default Democratic Party Strategy and What Should Replace It” or perhaps even the fufillment of my implicit promise to write “a common sense guide to contemplating interpretations of quantum mechanics without going insane.”

But speaking of good reasons for procrastination, I do have specific good reasons for procrastination on each of these topics:

1) Regarding Joe Wilson: While hopes that we’d soon learn who (if anyone) faces indictment by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald’s grand jury have almost surely been dashed on the metaphorical shoals of the many legal challenges various press organizations are (or are soon to be) filing against the various subpoenas that have recently been issued to major reporters, I still think we have hope that the full story will soon be revealed of those infamous forged documents which purported to be completed sales agreements of yellowcake uranium between Iraq and Niger and which led to Ambassador Wilson’s trip to Niger. (You may recall that a little over 2 weeks ago, on August 1, the Sunday Times of London levelled the explosive charge that the source of these forgeries which began filtering through the western intelligence agencies in late 2001, first with Italian military intelligence (“SISMI” – Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Militare) and then various British, French, and US agencies by early 2002—was in fact the Italian military intelligence agency itself! Josh Marshall discusses this article on his blog here, and expresses his distress that the The Times thus scooped him and Laura Rozen who’ve been working on this very story since early January of this year for The Washington Monthly. Mr. Marshall and Ms. Rozen’s article should be coming out soon.)

2) Regarding Imperial Hubris: The furor over certain passages in his book is not the end of Mr. Scheuer’s 15 minutes of fame, now that it’s clear he’s in a running battle with the CIA over making his views known so publicly, a battle which is certain to intensify now that a scathing e-mail he sent to the 9-11 Commission to register his dissent from their conclusions has been leaked to the New York Times. I’m waiting to see how this plays out.

3) Regarding the question of for what the Democratic Party should stand: Running debate has erupted in the Blogosphere of to what extent Democrats should commit to some sort of explicit, idealistic democracy promotion or simply embrace “realism.” A rant has long been simmering in my addled little brain which shall argue (a) idealistic foreign policy lives or dies by its results not its intentions, and thus (b) it behooves those of us who fall on the idealistic side of the spectrum to proffer pragmatic ideas and break out of the tunnel vision that has focused this debate almost exclusively on Iraq and the Greater Middle East Initiative.

4) Regarding interpretations of quantum mechanics: I’m hung up on this extremely interesting paper by Aage Bohr (the younger part of the most famous father-son combo* in the history of the Nobel Prize for Physics, being the winner of the 1975 prize and son of the 1922 Laureate, the legendary Niels Bohr):

Reviews of Modern Physics 67, 1–35 (January 1995)

Primary manifestation of symmetry. Origin of quantal indeterminacy

Aage Bohr and Ole Ulfbeck
The Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, DK-2100, Copenhagen, Denmark

Quantal physics is established as a manifestation of symmetry more far-reaching than hitherto appears to have been recognized. In this primary manifestation, the coordinate transformations of spacetime invariance are themselves the elementary variables, which define their own properties without appeal to an assumed quantal formalism. In irreducible representations, the symmetry variables are inherently indeterminate, and the probabilistic laws invoked in the interpretation of traditional quantum physics are found to originate in geometric relations between these variables. Completeness is, therefore, not an issue, and the quantum of action is not part of the theory of symmetry variables. Quantal physics thus emerges as but an implication of relativistic invariance, liberated from a substance to be quantized and a formalism to be interpreted. A symmetry variable appears in a measurement with one of its eigenvalues, but does not have a value (cannot be represented by a number) in an irreducible representation, which combines sets of eigenvalues. It is this generalized significance of a measurement that allows for correlations that cannot arise for classical variables. The observation of symmetry variables is illustrated by an interferometer experiment measuring reflection symmetry and by the equivalent coincidence experiment registering the polarization of two quanta. The measurement process becomes a matter of following the state of affairs of the symmetry variables in their unitary evolution. For the resolution of the dilemmas that quantal phenomena have been felt to pose, it appears crucial to recognize that indeterminacy, as an inherent property of a symmetry variable in a multidimensional representation, is not affected by subsequent observations. A position variable and the canonical commutator with momentum, which are basic elements of nonrelativistic quantum mechanics, emerge from spacetime symmetry, but require the link between space and time of relativistic invariance. The transition to the classical regime is analyzed in terms of a quenching of nonlocality in the state of affairs of the multidimensional symmetry variables. While the elementary variables constitute individual quanta in irreducible representations, product representations of spacetime symmetry describe systems of bosons and fermions, which form local fields with canonical properties. The discussion is focused on spacetime invariance (noninteracting quanta), but gauge invariance is itself a primary manifestation of symmetry and is as such encompassed by the theory of symmetry variables.

©1995 The American Physical Society

URL: http://link.aps.org/abstract/RMP/v67/p1
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This paper, despite being published in the major long-form-article professional journal in physics, seems not to have aroused much interest in the community in the decade since it was published. I can’t tell yet if that’s because it’s a seeming dead end or it’s because Aage has pushed this idea out of the mainstream of physics with his subsequent metaphysical insistence that it establishes a “genuine fortuitousness” underlying Nature, that is, observed events are fundamentally uncaused. (See, for example, most recently:

Foundations of Physics 34, 405-417 (March 2004)

The Principle Underlying Quantum Mechanics

Aage Bohr
The Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, DK-2100, Copenhagen, Denmark

Ben R. Mottelson
Nordita, DK-2100, Copenhagen, Denmark. mottelson@nbi.dk

Ole Ulfbeck
The Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, DK-2100, Copenhagen, Denmark

The present article reports on the finding of the principle behind quantum mechanics. The principle, referred to as genuine fortuitousness, implies that the basic event, a click in a counter, comes without any cause and thus as a discontinuity in spacetime. From this principle, the formalism of quantum mechanics emerges with a radically new content, no longer dealing with things (atoms, particles, or fields) to be measured. Instead, quantum mechanics is recognized as the theory of distributions of uncaused clicks that form patterns laid down by spacetime symmetry and is thereby revealed as a subject of unexpected simplicity and beauty. The departure from usual quantum mechanics is strikingly borne out by the absence of Planck’s constant from the theory. The elimination of indeterminate particles as cause for the clicks, which the principle of genuine fortuitousness implies, is analogous to the elimination of the ether implied by the principle of relativity.

© 2004 Plenum Publishing Corporation (Kluwer Academic)

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1023/B:FOOP.0000019621.02554.7e
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NB: Foundations of Physics, while peer-reviewed and having some very eminent physicists on its editorial board, has… ahem… a tendency to attract… um, how to say it politely? …the intriguing speculations of eminent physicists in their autumn years as well as younger, less eminent physicsts who aspire to that wizened, autumnal state of mind.)

[* Nobel Trivia Enthusiasts: The Nobel Prize in Physics has seen a remarkable 4 father/son combos:

1) Sir Joseph John Thomson (1906) & Sir George Paget Thomson (1937)
2) Sir William Henry Bragg & Sir William Lawrence Bragg (1915 for both, the only prize for a father/son collaboration)
3) Niels Bohr (1922) & Aage Bohr (1975)
4) Karl Siegbahn (1924) & Kai Siegbahn (1981)

Alas, if only George H.W. Bush had been a Nobel Prize winning physicist rather than a president, George W. Bush might have been inspired toward a different calling.]

“Pigeon research will not stand still; if we do not experiment, other powers will.”

(Or: Silly & Fun Friday News)

One of the most beautiful things about living in a democracy is that even the most closely held state secrets are eventually declassified. Sure it might take 50-60 years, but it’s still laudable that democratic governments voluntarily relinquish their secrets.

So in that vein, behold the following very funny declassified projects from the 1940’s and 50’s-era British Secret Service. (NB: The documents were released by the UK National Archives on April 1st, 2004 but they were accompanied by official statements that they were most certainly not April Fools’ pranks:

Tom O’Leary, head of education and interpretation at the National Archives, told the paper: “It does seem like an April Fool but it most certainly is not. The Civil Service does not do jokes.”

Whether this is dry British wit or not, I can’t tell.)

1) Cold war bomb warmed by chickens

Plans to fill a nuclear landmine with chickens to regulate its temperature were seriously considered during the Cold War.

Civil servants at the National Archives say it is a coincidence the secret plan is being revealed on 1 April.

The Army planned to detonate the seven-tonne device on the German plains in the event of having to retreat.

Operation Blue Peacock forms part of an exhibition for the National Archives, in Kew, London, on Friday.

Professor Peter Hennessy, curator of the Secret State exhibition, told the Times: “It is not an April Fool. These documents come straight from the archives at Aldermaston. Why and how would we forge them?”

The bomb was designed to stop the Red Army advancing across West Germany during the height of the Cold War.

But nuclear physicists at the Aldermaston nuclear research station in Berkshire were worried about how to keep the landmine at the correct temperature when buried underground.

In a 1957 document they proposed live chickens would generate enough heat to ensure the bomb worked when buried for a week.

The birds would be put inside the casing of the bomb, given seed to keep them alive and stopped from pecking at the wiring.

The landmine would be remotely detonated.

Tom O’Leary, head of education and interpretation at the National Archives, told the paper: “It does seem like an April Fool but it most certainly is not. The Civil Service does not do jokes.”

2) UK pondered suicide pigeon attacks

British spy chiefs secretly considered training pigeons to fly into enemy targets carrying explosives or biological weapons, it has been revealed.

British intelligence set up a “pigeon committee” at the end of World War II to ensure expertise gained in the use of the birds to carry messages was not lost.

Documents now released to the National Archives reveal that the War Office intelligence section, MI14, warned: “Pigeon research will not stand still; if we do not experiment, other powers will.”

Among MI14’s proposals was the training of pigeons carrying explosives to fly into enemy searchlights.

Meanwhile, pigeon enthusiast Wing Commander WDL Rayner suggested a “bacteriological warfare agent” could be combined with the explosive.

‘Revolutionary’ tactics

“A thousand pigeons each with a two ounce explosive capsule, landed at intervals on a specific target, might be a seriously inconvenient surprise,” Mr Rayner wrote.

He believed his “revolutionary” ideas could change the way wars were fought, and had the tentative backing of wartime MI6 chief Sir Stewart Menzies.
However the internal security service MI5 branded Rayner a “menace in pigeon affairs”.

MI5’s Lieutenant Colonel Tommy Robertson wrote: “I thought that some time ago it had been made clear that Rayner should finish writing his manual and then have nothing further to do with this committee officially.”

Rayner’s plan for a 400-pigeon loft where tests would be carried out was abandoned due to wrangling among the intelligence agencies over funding.

Members of the public can view the 280 newly-released files at the National Archives, Kew, west London.

In Case You Were Wondering What The Last Post Was About…

… see this story. He was my colleague, my roommate, and my friend.