If the Earth were flat, Iggy and Jim could go to Tokyo on the Nebuchadnezzar

I was listening to Iggy Azalea’s song, “I’m so Fancy,” and I decided to join the Flat Earth Society.

By admitting this I will probably get into some sort of trouble. Scientists, such as myself, are thought to be classical music buffs, and if it were to emerge that some of us listen to pop or hip hop, our reputations would take a hit.

I suppose joining the Flat Earth Society could also get me into trouble, but I had to join. I wanted to tackle a serious problem, one that we all know but live in denial of, one that is global in scale, and one that affects all of us – the staggering sphericity of Earth.

The roundness of the Earth is massively annoying and there seems no way around it. But then I discovered the power of denial. As a scientist, of course, I was skeptical about denialists’ claims, but when Senator James Inhofe nearly crashed his 1978 twin-engine Cessna into a construction crew on a closed runway in Port Isabel-Cameron County Airport in Texas, it all came clear to me.

Many chalked up Inhofe’s near fatal maneuver to his hubris. The airport manager, Marshall Reece, said “I’ve got over 50 years flying, three tours of Vietnam, and I can assure you I have never seen such a reckless disregard for human life in my life. Something needs to be done. This guy is famous for these violations.”

James Inhofe recklessly endangering human life with his twin-engine Cessna (background).

It’s not Inhofe’s hubris, however, that is the problem- it’s his denial of science. The fault lies in the fact that his Cessna is designed and flies according to the laws of physics and is navigated on the principle that the Earth is round. Inhofe’s reckless endangerment of human life is most likely because he is a science denier flying a plane that requires understanding science to fly it safely. It would only be safe if he were flying something like the Nebuchadnezzar hovercraft from the sci-fi movie, The Matrix, a plane based entirely on fantasy and something he can better understand than physics. He could fly the Millennium Falcon, Starship Enterprise or the Good Ship Lollipop, but I’m guessing the Nebuchadnezzar’s navigation is based on flat-earth theory, so it seems the appropriate choice. I’ll explain below.

The Nebuchadnezzar form the “The Matrix.” It probably has a flat-earth navigation system.

The inconvenience of Earth’s sphericity

Perhaps the only thing more scientifically proven than climate change is the fact that the Earth is round. Earth’s roundness, however, like climate change, is really inconvenient, and while I understand that over 97% of scientists believe it’s round, it’s just not an idea consistent with what I want to believe. There are many reasons that our planet’s being round is inconvenient, but two are really striking. First, there are no straight lines on a sphere, which makes navigating Earth really difficult. I can’t just get out a flat map and draw a line from L.A. to Tokyo and then take off in that direction – I would never get there. If I stubbornly keep my nose pointed in one direction, because the Earth is round, I will stray from the circle that actually connects L.A. and Tokyo and instead spiral to the pole and my doom. To actually reach Tokyo, you need a good clock, a compass, and you need to do lots of trigonometry to calculate how to compensate for the roundness of the world. Let’s be honest, who among us does not find sines, cosines, and tangents (and don’t even get me started on secants) to be wretched things – SOHCAHTOA still gives me the willies.

Second, once you are only about 30 miles (18.6 km) on one’s way, the sphericity of the Earth means that things will disappear behind you – and that’s just plain spooky. Sphericity is why Sarah Palin can’t see Moscow from Wasilla, why we can’t see Tokyo from L.A., and why shopping carts disappear over the horizon in Walmart Supercenters.

Let’s face it; the roundness of the world is a serious problem and no one is doing anything about it.

How to flatten the Earth

Turns out that the Flat Earth Society is doing something about the tyranny of sphericity. Boasting over 500 members, the Society maintains a great web site along with a wiki, downloadable documents, member registry, and much more.

The Flat Earth Society has a nice map where the Earth is shown to be a disk with the Arctic in the center and as you go out to the ends of the Earth, you encounter a wall of ice. Try it – walk in any direction from the North Pole and you indeed hit a wall of ice (though a lot of it is melting). This wall of ice, mistakenly considered by sphereists to be another continent they call “Antarctica,” is kind of like the Wall in Game of Thrones, where the soldiers of the Night’s Watch guard the north of the Seven Kingdoms against the Others. But Game of Thrones is fantasy, where flying is principally done by dragons and three-eyed crows.

The Antarctic is not a continent, but a wall of ice and rock marking the ends of the Earth. (Map available from the Flat Earth Society’s web resources.)

Conventional physics, trigonometry, and known travel distances on Earth seem to make the Earth being flat unlikely. Flat-earth theory, however, is well grounded in biblical support and based on many other arguments, as explained nicely on the Society’s web site. They point out, for example, that King Nebuchadnezzar’s dream was given to him by God, and in that dream he was shown a tree that touched the heavens and could be seen from every corner of the Earth before it was destroyed.

Earth must be flat if Nebuchadnezzar’s tree could be seen from everywhere. For this reason, I presume the navigation system of the Nebuchadnezzar hovercraft is founded on flat-Earth principles.

King Nebuchadnezzar dreamt of a tree that reached the heavens and could be seen from everywhere on Earth – support for flat-Earth theory.

Faith in flatness

Ignoring science like climate change means reckless disregard for human life, but politicians avoid criminal charges by designing legislation to support their denial. Inhofe, for example, had to undergo a program of remedial training as penalty for his reckless flying, so he introduced the Pilot’s Bill of Rights (Public Law 112-153) to protect pilots from what he deemed government overreach. Similarly, 24 Republican Energy and Commerce committee members voted against the amendment to the Electricity Security and Affordability Act, denying climate change. The benefits of such personal convictions produced over $9.3 million dollars in industry contributions to climate deniers on the committee and it also hobbled further “government overreach” (i.e., the Environmental Protection Agency regulating carbon dioxide emissions by power plants).

It seems one can use the political capital of the tremendous public admiration for adherence to personal beliefs and faith to counter the minor hit one takes from public disdain for ignorance. So, in this spirit, I decided the Earth was flat.

All I have to say is:

“I’m no Earth scientist, but if you ask me, it’s flat. I mean, just look at any map – they are all flat. I’m not going to stand by and allow the American People to have to put up with things disappearing over the horizon and having to know trigonometry. It’s a personal opinion, not a scientific fact.”

Championing my faith over science should earn me public admiration, maybe even enough to counter my likely reputational hit I take for listening to Iggy Azalea.

Iggy Azalea; physicist and flat earther?

Returning to Iggy’s song which started this whole thing—though she’s not on the Flat Earth Society’s roster, I get the distinct feeling from her song that she’s a sphericity denier. I really like her catchy tune, but the refrain “I’m in the fast lane, from L.A. to Tokyo,” is what clued me into her subscribing to flat Earth theory. The refrain refers to her huge fan base, but what’s puzzling is that there’s only ocean between L.A. and Tokyo. Not a lot of music fans along this route, which is why I suppose it is critical for her to take the fast lane. So what she must mean is that her popularity is global, covering the whole world from one end (L.A.) to the other (Tokyo). A round Earth, however, has no ends, so if you simply mean from one point to the polar opposite, the polar opposite of L.A. is actually someplace between Madagascar and Australia, not Tokyo. So she must think the world is flat, with the most distant points being between L.A. and Tokyo, and since travel between the two involves going over the Pacific, you want to be in the fast lane.

Iggy and Jim go to Tokyo

So if Iggy Azalea is a sphericity denier, it means she must have to deal with figuring out where the “fast lane” between L.A. and Tokyo is. If you believe the Earth is flat you, then the fast lane is the straight line connecting L.A. and Tokyo on a flat map, or at least that would be the shortest path and hence the fastest “lane”. This straight-line path, however, is 5,786 miles (9,312 km) long, while the shortest path between L.A. and Tokyo is actually much shorter – 309 miles (497.3 km) shorter. If you plot this genuine “fast lane” on a flat map, it’s an arc skirting south of the Aleutians and, according to the scale on the map, appears longer than the straight-line connection.

The tyranny of sphericity means that one cannot simply go from L.A. to Tokyo following a straight-line path (right). You have to go in an arch (left). Annoyingly, the straight-line path is 309 miles longer, even though it looks shorter.

So I was thinking, though it might seem strange, that if Inhofe decided to give Iggy Azalea and her entourage a ride in his Cessna from L. A. to Tokyo in the fast lane, I’m guessing, at a maximum speed of 174 mph (280 km/h) and a range of about 1,600 miles (2,600 km), by denying that the Earth is round, he would need not only extra fuel for the extra 309 miles but around two hours of extra stuff to talk about, which would most likely be Iggy Azalea’s physics lessons (“And I’m still in the Murda Bizness; I could hold you down, like I’m givin’ lessons in physics”). He’d have to make stopovers in the Pacific, though given places like Kiribati are sinking due to climate change, his options are limited. More than likely, he would recklessly endanger Iggy Azalea and her entourage, although if they also happen to be climate deniers, then they would not fault him. For this reason, they take the Nebuchadnezzar hovercraft instead of the Cessna

OK, a wildly implausible scenario, Inhofe taking Iggy Azalea and her entourage in the fast lane from L. A. to Tokyo aboard the Nebuchadnezzar, in exchange for physics lessons, navigating by the flat earth map downloaded from the Flat Earth Society’s website.

But compared to what’s going on in Congress concerning climate change, my scenario is far more believable.

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Postscript

Sadly, though I joined the Flat Earth Society, I discovered today that the Earth is still round.

As Jean Baudrillard, the French philosopher said, “Reality is a bitch.”

environment

The “Yo momma” Solution

Seeing the crazy way that everything is connected to everything else is one of the best ways to find solutions to environmental problems. Consider, for example, the connections between the financial crash of 2008, Morgan Stanley (the mega finance corporation that borrowed $107.3 billion from us), “yo momma” jokes, and extraterrestrials – when you put it all together, it points to a possible cause and a solution to global environmental problems like mass extinction, habitat fragmentation, deforestation, and emerging diseases. I have to admit the chain of logic in this thesis of connections is a bit iffy, but I can explain. Let’s start at the beginning of the chain.

The Financial Crash of 2008

The boom times running up to the 2008 crash were, in part, attributable to a huge financial house of cards built on a foundation of bad loans. These loans were mortgages on overpriced homes purchased by people who couldn’t afford them. I’m simplifying; it’s a complicated story, and I’m no economist, so I’ll leave the full story for others (like Paul Krugman or Daniel Quinn Mills) to tell, but for our purposes here, suffice it to say these “sub-prime” mortgages were purchased by financial institutions that were locked into a complex scheme of largely unregulated risky monetary practices that totaled in the trillions. When the scheme collapsed Lehman Brothers tumbled, and Morgan Stanley followed quickly along with other major finance institutions like Merrill Lynch, AIG, Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, Bear Sterns, Goldman Sachs, and many others; all once deemed so powerful and secure they could never fail.

Morgan Stanley

Morgan Stanley fell in part because its hedge fund operations were financed by the purchase of those risky mortgages. What struck me as ridiculous was Morgan Stanley’s claim that it was a victim like everyone else, not one of the perpetrators. It claims it never knew the true nature of the risks it was taking.

Morgan Stanley

Seriously?

So when I read Nathaniel Popper’s article in The New York Times (December 29, 2014) that investigations reveal that Morgan Stanley did, indeed, know the risks and, in fact, was instrumental in the growth of bad mortgages, I wasn’t surprised.

What caught my eye, however, was a quote from Morgan Stanley executive Pamela Barrow’s e-mail to her colleague. Ms. Barrow called the people who bought the houses (with a few added punctuations of mine), “first-payment defaulting, straw buyin’, house-swappin’, first-time wanna-be home buyers.”

Oh snap!

Though not exactly the kind of sharp-tongued repartee of a Comedy Central celebrity roast or the clever verbal sparring of kids ranking or playing the dozens (insult contests) in my school days, Ms. Barrow shows some skill.

But where it really gets interesting is when she continued with a solution that could have saved Morgan Stanley and prevented the 2008 crash if it were implemented. She said,

“We should call all their mommas. Betcha that would get some of them good old boys to pay that house bill.”

That’s when it hit me and I had my “aha!” moment.

Yo-momma jokes

Where I grew up in Bedford Stuyvesant, mommas, in the abstract, were serious business – one did not talk about another’s momma unless it was to agitate. Because of this, “yo momma” jokes were common in ranking or the dozens – the jokes were not actually about mothers, they were just insults meant to test one’s resolve.

Consider, for example, “Yo’ momma’s so ugly, when she threw a boomerang, it didn’t come back!” or

“Yo momma’s house is so small, there isn’t room to change her mind,” or

“Yo momma’s so poor, she does her drive-by shootings by bus,” or

“Yo momma’s so dumb, she stood on a chair to raise her IQ.”

In a moment of honest reflection, when Ms. Barrow considered the risk inherent in Morgan Stanley’s growing acquisitions of sub-prime mortgages to fuel their hedge funds, she must have entertained inserting the clause in the loan agreements that read, “Upon failure to make payments, we’re calling yo’ momma, who, incidentally, is so stupid she thinks a sub-prime is a steak.”

Her solution of threatening homeowners with the possibility of having their mommas drawn into the matter and possibly having to defend their mommas (a cultural obligation rather than a rule of law) if they defaulted on their loans was brilliant.

Extraterrestrials

So here’s my thesis – it is common to consider Earth our mother, and, indeed, the mother of all life on Earth, so Barrow’s momma-based strategy could work, except for one complication – when ranking or playing the dozens, one’s opponent has to be someone outside your family, your friends, or your posse. When it comes to Earth, who is momma to us all, the yo-momma joke has to be leveled by someone from another planet (their momma being their planet).

A somewhat creepy view of mother Earth, but it works. (Image from http://planetoplano.blogspot.com/).

So, if the SETI Institute, those folks searching for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence, were to one day receive a staticky, crackling set of communications that that splashed across the news media around the world, and roughly translated as:

“Yo planet is so depauperate, it makes the Tabernacle Choir look speciose!” or

“Yo planet is so fragmented, it makes Humpty Dumpty look good!” or

“Yo planet’s got so many emerging diseases, it makes a zombie apocalypse feel like a Club Med vacation!” or

“Yo planet’s climate is changing so fast, it makes a Kardashian romance look like a long-term relationship!” or

“Yo planet’s so deforested, a Brazillian wax leaves more bush!”,

people would be outraged. Well, yes, and a bit surprised about the nature of our first contact. After getting over the shock of discovering we are not alone, however, we would be motivated to respond, “Oh yeah? Well yo planet is so f#@!ed up, even James Inhofe thinks your climate is changing!”

OK, since waiting for extraterrestrials to taunt us is a bit farfetched, I do hope the chain of logic behind the idea is at least clear.

One might say that Earth as mom is already a well-known environmental trope, but it doesn’t resonate with everyone. But maybe yo-momma jokes about our Earth, our mom and mom to all species and mom to our vibrant, living world, might just get even the most apathetic exorcised enough to defend our momma and her honor.

Uncategorized

Waterboarding America

I like the idea that an executive summary can be 524 pages long since I famously go on too long about most things. Perhaps it was not possible to distill the six thousand page Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program. It’s terrible that this Report has so much to say about our country’s torture – 119 people “detained,” a quarter of whom were wrongfully held.

The centerpiece of the Report is waterboarding. Much of the outrage, however, concerns the fact that people whom we entrusted with our national security lied to us, took the law into their own hands and otherwise abused the trust we gave them. It seems the CIA, at a time when the country seemed willing to give up all its freedoms and break every rule to fight terrorism, became dysfunctional, disorganized, incompetent, greedy and deceptive – at least that’s the New York Times’ synopsis of the Report.

Waterboarding is drowning without the killing part – the waterboarded detainees were physically and psychologically scarred for life, but they were never drowned. If any had actually been drowned, there would be much more outrage. The one who died, Mr. Gul Rahman, died of hypothermia – he died shackled, nude, alone on a concrete floor, the officer responsible considered one of the agency’s best. In hypothermia, you pass out, some say even experience euphoria in the final moments before you die. When you drown, suffering is horrible and the last moments are violent and desperate. But no one was drowned.

When I think of innocents drowning, I think of Hurricane Sandy – 117 died, which is close to the number of CIA detainees – a third of the deaths were from drowning. Hurricane Katrina was much worse – 1,300 died, almost half from drowning.

But wait a minute; they died because Congress, when it comes to climate change, is dysfunctional, disorganized, incompetent, greedy and deceptive. Why no kerfuffle?

The Senate Report, on the other hand, has created quite the kerfuffle. Those who wilfully ignored the fact that torture does not work (as, ironically, determined by the CIA in its own 1989 report), ignored our commitment to never torturing prisoners. It’s our domestic and international policy. It’s international law. Yet, officials we trusted knowingly stood by and let torture happen, or feigned ignorance and let it happen, or let their ideology dictate their action and let it happen – those who betrayed our trust should be brought to justice!

Heads will roll!

Well, of course, not literally. That would be cruel and inhuman, which is forbidden by our Constitution.

It’s a bit uncertain whose heads will metaphorically roll. Who will be brought up on criminal charges? Some think President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice should be charged. Maybe George Tenet, Porter Goss, and Mike Haydon, former directors of the CIA and John Brennan, current director? John Yoo, John Rizzo, Jay Bybee, Alberto Gonzales, Cofer Black, and maybe Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell, psychologists who helped with the methodology. That’s well over a dozen.

But I keep thinking of those who drowned in Katrina and Sandy. Held hostage by poverty, discrimination, and a government who knowingly and wilfully ignored what climate change science has been telling them for 20 years. If seventy percent of the public and 97% of scientists agree that climate change is real and our officials were entrusted to represent us, then they abused our trust – just like those named in the Report. The arguments of climate deniers are contrived, chaotic, ever-changing, and many deniers are supported by money from industry or the Koch brothers, which reflects influence by ideologues, politics, or just plain greed.

Senator Imhofe sanctioning the waterboarding America and Vice President Cheney sanctioning waterboarding.

Senator Imhofe sanctioning the waterboarding America and Vice President Cheney sanctioning the waterboarding of CIA detainees.

The World Health Organization estimates that 150,000 people are currently dying every year from climate change – although the causes are quite varied – only some of them are death due to drowning from extreme weather, like hurricanes and floods.

It seems that climate deniers in Congress and their backers reflect dysfunction, disorganization, incompetence, greed and deception. But wait a minute, this is exactly what everyone is upset about concerning the CA waterboarding detainees.

So doesn’t this make climate change deniers, like Senators Imhoff, Cruz, Enzi, Johnson, McConnell, Vitter, Coryn, and the majority of the Republican Party (only 8 are not climate change deniers), the same as those who condone waterboarding? Too many to list. Desmogblog.com list over 260 prominent climate change deniers – a lot bigger list than those condoning CIA waterboarding

It seems like climate change deniers are waterboarding America – only in this case, people actually drown.

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Tag Archives: climate change

If the Earth were flat, Iggy and Jim could go to Tokyo on the Nebuchadnezzar

The “Yo momma” Solution

Waterboarding America