Rachel, Leza and Fifi

2012

Tomorrow is the End of 2012.

I turned 63, and I still feel I have some time left.

The most Relevant Science I learnt this year is the massive migration of humans to more temperate climates. Two dear friends of mine recently moved North. There are close to 11% of the US population coming from Mexico. Obama got elected by an unprecedented 10% of Mexican-American voters, that overwhelmingly (more than 70%) voted for him.

Mitt Romney was a phony, and my people saw through him.

I am planning to make 2013, the year when WE move in!

Christmas Eve Adventure

Today we went to pick up our son for Christmas. Chicago can be tricky if you don't know your way around.  Union Station, what can be easier right? Wrong, he did not take the train but a bus line, which is not Greyhound Lines. Better and cheaper service, he said. Anyway, there I am at the appointed time at the corner of Jackson and Canal. I did not bring my down jacket, I was getting cold, I spotted an old wool hat on the floor, and donned it.

Finally I see the bus at the other side of the corner I was at; there I go looking for him. I didn't find him, finally I do, we hug, and start looking for his mother. She was at Starbucks, Clinton & Adams. We are all together now. Where is the car? I asked: nearby, answers my wife, in the parking lot, we walked over there, and a BMW is blocking the way!  Nobody in sight and near freezing temperature. My son and I go in the car. She finally calls from the Church in the corner. They have Christmas Eve mass, and they already announced to get the owners to move the car.

Since nobody comes we decide to go to Union Station and wait. My son has a McDonald's treat, and Mary tells us that even though she told them her name, they didn't invited her in, because it was jam packed. How ironic we thought. Here we have Mary, her husband and son, on Christmas Eve, and they don't let us in!

Oh well, we are home now. I am so happy, since he is cozy under his down blanket on his bed.

We found a surprise gift from his grandma in the mailbox!

Push and Pull

In the previous note I proposed a possible migration north because of the better conditions. One should not forget though, the presence of a push force, from the emitting country to the receiving one; that I believe is represented by the crime wave surrounding areas in climate distress. The Sahara desert is growing, causing the death of millions of people in "ethnic" wars. I hereby propose that the Sonora desert is also growing.

That is the push force!

Complexity

Bejan says, "flow is such, that next time around it is easier". Obviously this observation does not come from fundamental physics, because there is no next time around in the basic Laws of Nature, so far postulated by physicists. Bejan is talking about emergent properties.

I am reading Leen Decin's beautiful review "Late Stages of Stellar Evolution - Herschel's contributions", one learns there, about the emergent complexity discovered with the space observatory Herschel.

Even the small galactic magnetic field, one thousandth of the Earth's field, gets into the natural game of making, "flow easier".

Amazing!

Massive Human Migration?

I found a dear student from Mexico in Portland Oregon!

She has moved looking for a better future for her future children. Another student I met several years before is already in Canada. These are anecdotal data points. What is more relevant is the 10% of Mexican-Americans who voted for Obama this year, and who do not like the GOP extreme views exposed recently through the Tea Party movement, and the Minutemen.

It seems to me that we are witnessing one of the biggest human migrations in history. From tropical dysfunctional states, to temperate cosmopolitan regions.

Be it as it may, I am happy with my two beloved children in the U.S. of A..

Beautiful Leza and Rachel

Sal Castro - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sal Castro - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

"Salvador B. Castro (born October 25, 1933) is a Mexican-American educator and activist. He is most well known for his role in the 1968 East Los Angeles high school walkouts, a series of protests against unequal conditions in Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) schools. Although he has retired, he continues to lecture about his experiences and the importance of education, especially for Mexican Americans."

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Zapatistas: “to be heard, we march in silence” | Reflections on a Revolution ROAR

Zapatistas: “to be heard, we march in silence” | Reflections on a Revolution ROAR:

 "As the Maya calendar ends, a new cycle of struggle begins with thousands of Zapatistas peacefully and silently occupying town squares across Chiapas."

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Is This the End?

I was born in Mexico City, I live in Warrenville, IL. I do not believe the world is ending on Friday. But; my request for help from Mexico has not been granted. In one case not even answered. Today I read the Mexico City paper, La Jornada, and find out opaqueness. This very free and open newspaper has pieces on the leader of the Mexican Teachers Union, a crook I believe, who the new government seems to be protecting. Also a very courageous commentator, exposes  new Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto's  cruel attack against Mexican students.

Changing country, I expected president Obama to announce in Newtown, an attack against the gun lobby, all I saw were platitudes about our need to change.

It seems to me that evil people are in charge of governmental powers in Mexico, and the US.

I do hope that something happens on Friday, to end this corrupt system.

There.

Well today is December 21, 2012. The world didn't end.

I did find out though, that Mexico is in the middle of a drought. I expect more problems down there.

Mayan Silent Revolt!

La Jornada

The Tea Party dropped the Fiscal Cliff Bomb!

Even with Obama's proposal, I guess I am not getting my tax rebate.

Abrams & Primack

The New Universe and the Human Future

Arturo Cisneros Stoianowski, Bruce Hoeinesein, and Hector Rubalcava

These three gentlemen, graduated from Caltech, and their work has enriched the world. I recently found out about Rubalcava, his 1957 PhD thesis has astrobiological importance nowadays. I wonder why Cisneros and Rubalcava do not continue scientific work.

I am happy to report that Bruce is active in Ecuador. From the three, he is the only one I have met personally. Great guy.

Noosphereans

There are some citizens of this new country, I have my friend Edgar Altamirano, and Paul Krugman. They just inhabit the space. I know that Edgar hardly sleeps, also professor Krugman is always present online. I am slowly joining them. I depend on Google.

Today I posted a Term Paper, here, and the transparencies that go with it here.

This is fun!

Ravi Shankar

And Then Comes Society

First hydrocarbons, and other carbon based compounds are formed in space, then chemical signaling is established in the brain, finally society appears. Nowadays the Internet introduces another set of open protocols, which allow world wide communication.

There is an important aspect at the society level. Acemoglu and Robinson discovered Why Nations Fail. Now it is rules, human made rules, which produce prosperity. It seems to me that there are cradles, nurseries, or whatever you want to call them, of ideas. Where ideas are created, advanced ways to be on Earth, are discovered, and those lucky ones, live better.

Go find your cocoon. I can assure you, it won't be near a warlord!

Cosmic Furnace

With so many flammable gases in Molecular Clouds, I imagine these places as big furnaces where chemical reactions produce the observed chemical complexity which is manifest in ourselves. Even more extraordinary,  is the final step to Intelligent life. The human cortex producing Intelligence, solved the last mile problem, rather the last micron problem with chemical signaling!

Cosmic Orchestra

Using the Deutsch Constructor concept, I feel like more than one Constructor, one has an orchestra. According to the article I have been referring to, Caselli & Ceccarelli, cosmic rays also play a role in the chemical construction of complexity. Given that these charged particles are produced independently of the chemical reactions, I wonder if the coordination is not more encompassing than we have so far assumed.

How Does my Mind Work?

As far as I can tell, I look for patterns. Instead of checking every single source for accuracy, I envision sweeping narratives to give a coherent story in a few steps.

Is the world like that?

I don't have a clue; my idea of an agnostic paradigm, is my effort to deal with the way I think. The proof is in the pudding, if some of my generalizations work in a few cases, I would be satisfied. Physics has always seem to me as the study of the simple; problem is, I am looking into more complex processes now.

Chemistry studies complex processes, it is important to notice that neural communication is chemical also, not physical. Reading a review on "Our astrochemical heritage", I learn that physical processes give way to chemical ones: Those take the day, and determine the essential conditions that produced life. Maybe also, Intelligent Life; who knows?

Lionel Messi

Noosphere

Wikipedia

Vladimir Vernadsky proposed this idea; Pierre Teilhard de Chardin made it popular in 1922 in his book Cosmogenesis,

"The main thrust of Teilhard's gnosis was a foundational understanding of the Universe, which was expressed in his theory of Cosmogenesis. According to Teilhard, the universe is no longer to be considered a static order, but rather a universe in process. And it is a continuing, upslope trajectory of evolution that Teilhard declares a cosmogenesis. The process of Teilhard's holistic cosmos is broken into the following categories: the Without and Within of things; the evolution of matter, life, consciousness; and the Omega Point."

From Stoa del Sol

The surface of my brain, as the keyboard of my computer, are surfaces to store and retrieve information, information being marks which can be read, interpreted, and acted on, in the process of Universe building, or construction.

 I believe current centers of learning will evolve towards the Omega point. Scientific magazines will become eZines, more and more intellectuals will contribute to the official knowledge, Wikipedia, and the arXive are just  previews of things to come. Robust platforms, better than Google Docs, will be collaborative structures. Live science will be almost subliminal. Everybody will be experiencing reality, and collectively constructing a better and better fit. The Noosphere will come of age!

No End, but a Beginning of a New World: José Argüelles.

Great Review!

Once upon a time, there was a small cold cloud of gas and dust in an interstellar medium broken into several clumps and laments of di erent masses and dimensions. Then, about 4.5 billion years ago, the small cloud became the Solar System. What happened to that primordial cloud? When, why and how did it happen? Does the Earth receive a heritage from those old eons? Can this heritage help us to understand our origins?

arXiv

Manifest Destiny and Tonantzin

Flowers, candles and messages pay tribute to the singer outside the Basilica de Guadalupe in Monterrey, Mexico.
 NYT

Tonantzin is Mother Earth, and Manifest Destiny, is a wrong headed ideology.

Tomorrow thousands of Original Americans will end their walk from Mexico to New York, to celebrate Virgin Guadalupe, aka Tonantzin. On the other hand the wrong idea of Manifest Destiny represents the exclusionary view of white Europeans towards reality. For them the Universe, Mother Earth exists to serve only them.

Now that the limits of growth are everywhere to be seen, it is reassuring to see the hope of so many Original Americans walking through this Earth, to tell the World about Virgen Guadalupe.

¡Viva la Virgen de Guadalupe!

I am sad that Ritchie Valens, and now Jenni Rivera did not get the recognition they deserved while they were with us. They are such saintly figures.

Is There a New Science in the Making?

The agnostic paradigm I have been advocating in this blog, is well underway in several facilities already in operation. What I am trying to do here, is to put them neatly in one package.

Right now, I am reading the review, "Our astrochemical heritage", by Caselli & Ceccarelli already in the arXiv.  You can find there, an intense collaboration between scientists of different disciplines, looking for our extreme, or deep, "Origins Story." To my mind they represent a Constructor in the sense of David Deutsch.

Databases, computers, meteorites, and so on and so forth, in one of the biggest open source projects, I am aware of. I can call  this "The Constructor of Our Origins."

The end result, won't be a "Theory of Everything", but a "Cosmic Story of Ourselves."

The Information that is Out There

Information is all around us. The scientific method allows us to collect it, organize it, and understand it. Nevertheless current practices do not emphasize this simple fact.

We should use Claude Shannon Information Theory's framework, to address ALL information tasks.

An important element is the meaning of probability, I believe the best course of action is to stand on a solid Baysean Foundation, i.e., founded on Bayes' Theorem.

It is important to understand our work as statistical in nature, without essentialism. There are no "Laws of Nature", anywhere in the Universe, all there are, are marks for us to understand. In this paradigm we are like Hansel & Gretel ; lost children trying to follow, marks we left, and more importantly, those we did not leave.

Automatic information machines, i.e., computers, are very important in this paradigm.

Two Beautiful Little Girls

Emma Whitehead:

and my own, Leza Cantoral:

They both almost died.

The NYT has an article on Emma here.

My daughter was attacked by insects. She took a sick cat from the street, and before we knew it, she got bitten all through her skin, and the kidney malfunctioned. A great doctor in Mexico, Rodolfo Javier Gordillo de Anda, saved her life.

And life goes on.

Jenni Rivera and the Mexican-American War

Jenni Rivera died yesterday. I just finished reading Amy Greenberg's book, "A Wicked War". I feel conflicted.

Obama got over seventy percent of the Latino vote. All he had to do was to deliver what he had already offered when elected the first time. Show some sympathy for the Mexican-Americans plight. He started moving towards a comprehensive Immigration Reform.

What happened?

Americans in 1847 supported a war that ended with a few courageous boys dying while defending their military school in Mexico City. Niños Héroes. The place where they died is a few miles away from where I was born in Mexico. Those Americans wanted to make Mexico a country of slaves; just like President James Knox Polk and his wife had slaves, they wanted to make Texas, and the whole of Mexico a wretched country of slaves.

Jenni was abused by the men in her life. Some of that type of men, have brought Mexico to her knees. The War on Drugs, has produced War Lords controlling parts of the country.

My conflict is expressed in one question: Why did Mexico fail?

Mr. Obama and all of us, have to bring social justice to so many suffering human beings.

This has to end. We all have the same DNA, we are all siblings!

Jenni Rivera

George Romero

Persistence

Below I link a paper by Chao et al., with a solution to the vacuum stability problem, given the measured mass of the Brout-Higgs boson.

If there were no more physics, beyond the Standard Model, then our Universe is not stable. These scientists connect this problem, with a way to calculate other unknowns, say the neutrino masses, and the nature of Dark Matter.

There might be a better way.

Persistence is connected to stability of the ground state. Quantum Mechanics only takes us down to the ground state, if this state is not stable, we need something else.

Recently David Deutsch and Adrian Bejan have proposed what they call "The Constructor Theory", and "The Constructal Theory", respectively. In both cases I see a connection between construction and the concept of time. The way I put it is that: "Time Decodes Persistence".

I consider this a new paradigm, in the sense of Thomas Kuhn.

This is an "Agnostic Method". Given that the eye fills the blind spot with made up images, I believe the Scientific Method, as it has been used so far, does not question our perceptions, and thus has blind spots also. Reification can be a systematic error, leading us astray. I do not know if Maxwell's equations say, exist somewhere in the universe, and directs traffic, so to say. I rather assume that we have built equations, that so far have provided with numbers, that have been right on, in all cases checked. That is great, but I do not believe these equations are "real".

Information exists outside conscious observers, I propose that it exists as marks, directing the way things happen. Deutsch, makes us realize that we need a constructor in our description of anything, say the creation of complexity in the Universe. Paola Caselli, and Cecilia Ceccarelli (C&C), have a good description of "Our astrochemical heritage", in the arXiv. According to Deutsch, I will say that "catalysts" are the constructors, those are the parts that do  not change, when we go from hydrogen to helium in the CNO cycle, say, or in any of the organic chemistry reactions described in C&C's review. No observer is needed, no consciousness is necessary, the catalysts, are the constructors, they direct traffic.

There is another way to talk about a constructor, it is called: Intelligent Design, I do not want to go there, nor to the reification of "The Laws of Physics". I do not know if the constructor is intelligent, or if the equations exist. This I call the "Agnostic Method".

The proof is in the pudding, as Deutsch explains in his book, "The Beginning of Infinity", knowledge is transformative. Once some humans knew about Technetium,  they could produce it in Italy. Emilo Segrè, and Carlo Perrier did it for the first time in 1936.

In this paradigm, the observed object is persistence, time is the way we deal with this fact, in our daily experience and in science.

Space and Time are a priori, according to Immanuel Kant.

"Kant is best known for his transcendental idealist philosophy that time and space are not materially real but merely the ideal a priori condition of our internal intuition. But he worked in other areas as well. He made an important astronomical discovery, namely a discovery about the nature of the Earth's rotation, for which he won the Berlin Academy Prize in 1754. Even more importantly, from this Kant concluded that time is not a thing in itself determined from experience, objects, motion, and change, but rather an unavoidable framework of the human mind that preconditions possible experience."



Wikipedia

Again, I do not know, but within the "Agnostic Method", it does not matter.

[1210.0491] Higgs Vacuum Stability, Neutrino Mass, and Dark Matter

[1210.0491] Higgs Vacuum Stability, Neutrino Mass, and Dark Matter:

Recent results from ATLAS and CMS point to a narrow range for the Higgs mass: $M_H\in[ 124, 126] {\rm GeV}$. Given this range, a case may be made for new physics beyond the Standard Model (SM) because of the resultant vacuum stability problem, i.e., the SM Higgs quartic coupling may run to negative values at a scale below the Planck scale. We study representative minimal extensions of the SM that can keep the SM Higgs vacuum stable to the Planck scale by introducing new scalar or fermion interactions at the TeV scale while solving other phenomenological problems. In particular, we consider the type-II seesaw model, which is introduced to explain the non-zero Majorana masses of the active neutrinos. Similarly, we observe that if the stability of the SM Higgs vacuum is ensured by the running of the gauge sector couplings, then one may require a series of new electroweak multiplets, the neutral component of which can be cold dark matter candidate. Stability may also point to a new U(1) gauge symmetry, in which the SM Higgs carries non-zero charge.

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