Experimental theology: religious football

Somewhere between one third and one half of Americans believe that God / Jesus cares enough about the outcome of sports contests to intervene, typically in favor of those who pray most fervently. I propose to put this belief to the test with the new game of Religious Football.

The game is very simple. It is played on a conventional American football field with a standard ball. The game begins with the ball at midfield on a tee, and two teams of eleven prayers line up on opposite sides of the field, five yards from the 50 yard line. Each team prays as hard as it can for the ball to move towards the opponents' end zone. Prayers can be spoken or silent, according to each team's ecclesiastical tradition.

If a team manages to pray the ball across the line, they score a point, the ball is re-centered, and the process begins again. After 60 minutes, the game ends and the team with the most points win.

This is a game where the "twelfth man" is exceptionally important. Supporters are allowed, even encouraged, to pray along with their team to help move the ball. (Conversely, the 13th man will be hung from the goalposts at half time).

There are a few other rules and penalties, to maintain order. The major ones include:

• Offsides: The players must maintain five yards from the ball at all times, so if one team's prayers cause the ball to move, it can advance and the other team must retreat. Approaching closer than that incurs a five yard penalty.
• Illegal touching: touching the ball in any way, or causing it to move with anything other than the power of prayer, is a ten yard penalty. 
• Out of bounds: any reference to an opponent's mother, sister, or other female relative is completely out of bounds and will be penalized ten yards.
• Roughing the pastor: any contact with the opponent's spiritual leader on the sidelines results in a 15 yard penalty. 

 I propose that we launch this game in Texas where, I'm told, both Jesus and football are popular.

I Hate Birthdays

The thing I hate most about birthdays in the Web era is the absurdly insincere birthday greetings in email and on FB from corporations that happen to have my birthday in their database. What am I supposed to think about "good wishes" that don't emanate from any actual person? At best, it's an attempt to co-opt the natural human reaction of reciprocity; at worst, it's a crude sales pitch (who doesn't want a new weed trimmer on their birthday, right?).

If I wanted to read meaningless, empty, formulaic wishes that don't genuinely emanate from any real person with real feelings, I would go stand and stare in front of the birthday card rack at Hallmark for an hour.

 At least, that's what I used to do before the restraining order.

Some Thoughts On Jurassic World

Oh, and SPOILERS, obviously.

Here's a couple of thoughts about Jurassic World that I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere.

1. Owen (Chris Pratt) is actually responsible for hundreds of deaths. If instead of trying to escape from the Indominus Rex compound he had heroically accepted his fate and sacrificed his own life so that the others could escape without releasing the dinosaur, nobody else would have died. Also, the movie would have been over much more quickly.

2. Everybody online is complaining about Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) running around the woods in her high heels and never once sinking in, losing a shoe, or breaking a heel. I think the director missed a great opportunity to capitalize on that. When Owen is pinned down by a pterosaur and Claire saves him, instead of shooting the pterosaur she should have spiked it in the head with her heel.

And then she and Chris could have exchanged some witty banter about how he's sorry for mocking her footwear, while all around them people continue to be dragged to their horrible deaths, all because Owen didn't sacrifice himself in the first act (see point 1 above).

3. As an aside, Claire is obviously not from New York or she would have a pair of sneakers in her purse that she changes into when it's time to run for the train.

4. I don't think I've ever seen such gratuitous product placement in a movie ostensibly about the evils of over-commercialization. Even in actual Mercedes commercials the camera doesn't caress the bodywork so lovingly before coming to rest on such a prominent shot of the emblem. The director of this movie either has the most profound sense of irony on the planet, or none at all. I'm not sure which.

How to win bar bets with Wikipedia

Step 1: Edit Wikipedia to insert a fake "fact". Choose your fact carefully: it needs to be unlikely enough that your mark will bet against it, but not so crazy that it will provoke obvious incredulity ("Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, is a Furry"), causing the mark to doubt the veracity of Wikipedia. You also need to be sure that your edit won't get quickly reverted, so stay away from entries that are closely watched, controversial, or recently in the news ("in 2014, more goats were killed in rail accidents in the US than people").

Step 2: Choose your mark and place your bet.

Step 3: "Prove" your claim by looking it up on Wikipedia. Collect your winnings and leave before the mark checks other sources or your Wikipedia edit gets reverted.

Physics Problem: barometers and building height

There's a physics problem that typically gets presented to children when they learn about pressure (air, water, and often mercury) and barometers. And it seems to me that the problem is broken. The question is: how could you use an ordinary barometer to measure the height of a tall building? And the expected answer is to measure the air pressure at the top and bottom, and then knowing the weight of air, compute the elevation change.

But let's check the feasibility of this with a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation. For any realistic earthbound circumstance, we can assume that the pressure drops linearly with altitude; see the chart below. For reference, Denver, Colorado is at about 1600m, and the highest town in Great Britain is under 500m; we won't find much in the way of tall buildings above an altitude of 4000m.

("Atmospheric Pressure vs. Altitude" by Geek.not.nerd - Own work. Licensed under CC0 via Wikimedia Commons)

So what would our barometer tell us? Since we're just investigating the feasibility here, we're going to round things a little to make the math easy. Don't worry, no truths were harmed during the making of this calculation:

• For every 1000m of altitude gained, the pressure drops ~10kPa, the chart tells us (at least, over the range we are concerned with).
• Thus for each meter, the pressure drops ~10Pa; that's 0.1hPa. (1 hectopascal or 1hPa = 100Pa, and is the modern unit equivalent to millibars, commonly used in meteorology.)

A typical household digital barometer can detect a change of +/- 0.5hPa (50Pa), and an analog "certified precision" $600 aneroid barometer is only accurate to 1hPa (100Pa). So with one of these instruments, we can hope to measure building height to, at best, an accuracy of 5 to 10m -- maybe good enough to estimate the number of stories, but not the height.

Fortunately there are two other possible ways to use a barometer to determine a building's height:

1. Drop the barometer off the top of the building and time how long it takes to hit the ground below. For a building in the range of 100m to 200m, timing accurate to 0.01s would give a precision of around 0.5m, so we will probably want to use some kind of electronic timing device rather than a hand-operated stopwatch. (With manual timing we could reasonably only count on a timing accuracy of 1/10s, which by coincidence converts to about the same height accuracy as the digital barometer.) For example, we could have synchronized clocks at top and bottom, an electromagnet release that records the start time and a sound-activated circuit to record the stop time. For a heavy barometer, we can ignore air resistance.
2. Find the building custodian and say to him "If you can tell me how tall this building is, I will give you this lovely barometer". This is definitely my favorite solution.

NOTE TO STUDENTS: do not use this answer in any test unless you are very sure about the sense of humor of your teacher.

The American problem

The fundamental tension in America is that the red states want to be Sparta and the blue states want to be Athens, and the only thing that unites them in common cause is fear of Persia.

On the intractability of free will

[Author's note: the thoughts here originated as a Letter to the Editors at New Scientist, in response to a somewhat throwaway remark, in an article about randomness, that chance may be essential to the existence of free will. I felt that the point deserved delving into in more depth. New Scientist did publish the letter, but as is typical edited it down for publication -- in particular, many of my adverbs did not survive. Consequently, I wanted to share the full text here.]

Randomness may be necessary to "admit free will" in an otherwise-mechanical universe ("Chance", New Scientist 14 March 2015, p.28ff) but by itself it is not sufficient. It's hard to argue scientifically about the existence of free will in the absence of a rigorous definition of what it is, but we can say something about what it does. And at a minimum, it's existence requires that the outputs of my brain -- my actions -- are not completely determined by the inputs plus initial state. This is, of course, an astonishing proposition that is contrary to any other known physical system or law. Even if we introduce randomness, we merely allow a range of outcomes distributed probabilistically, but we still have no element of intentionality or purpose, the other essential ingredient in free will. Randomness alone would make us no more free than tumbling dice.

One intriguing possibility, however, is that whatever free will actually is, randomness provides a means for it to influence the brain without apparently violating known physical law; a curtain behind which it can hide. Imagine that free will is able to influence apparently-random outcomes deep in the brain, to achieve a desired output, but is also constrained by the need to appear random over the long term. The brain would be like a rigged casino where the roulette wheel comes up red or black at the casino's own choosing, but it must still ensure that the two come up equally over the long term if it is not to be caught breaking the rules. Correspondingly, we might speculate that free will rigs the brain game by influencing individual apparently-random quantum outcomes, which chaotic systems in turn amplify to macroscopic scale, but is limited in the long run because the overall outcomes must match our probabilistic quantum expectations.

Intriguingly, existing psychological experiments are consistent with this model of free will. For example, we know that behaviors that are usually considered exercises of free will such as "paying attention" or "resistance to temptation" are limited and can be exhausted, requiring time to recharge, even though they don't seem to be associated with anything as obvious as depletion of specific neurotransmitters or saturation of synapses. Yet this is exactly what we expect if free will can only influence a limited number of outcomes while staying hidden within known physical laws.

Whatever free will turns out to be -- assuming it exists at all -- understanding it will take at least as great a conceptual leap as that from classical mechanics to quantum theory. And perhaps it is only the reality of chance that connects these three views of reality into a consistent, scientifically explicable universe.