ABOVE ALL QUESTION!

We know that Iron does not turn to gold. We do, don’t we? And that Stone cannot be converted to plastic. No disrespect to either the stone or plastic. Both are held in equal regard. After all billions of pounds of stone is the fundamental foundation of the Pyramids and plastic is the modern-day ubiquity, hailed and maligned simultaneously.

But if you did believe in alchemy and magic then this is the right place for you to come and be exorcised. 

From John Ford’s movie, “The Man who shot Liberty Valance” comes the age-old quote “when the legend becomes fact, print the legend." There is so much truth oozing out in those words, especially in these modern days in this age of highly evolved civilization. Snarky as that might sound to some and others, it is the elemental truth of the day, these days.

Manipulating someone takes a calm shrewdness and calculated but persistent endeavor. It happens in everyday life, be it in science, politics or even and perhaps especially in medicine. We will deal with the two bookends around politics and you are free to draw your conclusions on the politics of today. I will not lurk there to ruin anyone’s day.

Science is real. It is based on empiricism. It is also based on trial by error. In that solemn enterprise it also is fleeting. The empirical methods change, and a more robust mechanism is realized. Take the Wright Brother Flyer for instance. A trial by error by ingenious bicycle makers that cost at least one life in the process of powering the first flight, today, we have arrived at behemoth aircraft weighing millions of pounds, capable of carrying hundreds of passengers far, far away from their homes and back. Each step of the way to here, there were errors and each error made for a more robust innovation. Learning from errors is how science advances. Science changes as new tools of empiricism emerge. Thus, emergence is nothing more than gaining a new solution to a tired old problem. In the case of the Wright Brothers, it was that man can fly on powered aircraft. But they also stood on the shoulders of Otto Lilienthal, the German aviator who soared several times on non-powered gliders. And innovation is nothing more than building on the past.

The alter ego of science is pseudoscience. Even joining the two words is blasphemous at best. Science is purported to be reality based on the current assessment of available information seen through the lens of expectation. The term pseudo is the forced evil twin who imposes restrictions on science by creating false legends and then printing them as science. Let me give you a few short examples;

1. The Food Plate was boasted as the nutritional equivalent harbinger for good health and endorsed by none other than the largest of the medical societies. Turns out that 60% carbohydrate base in that pyramid created an untold calamity of obesity and chronic illness such as diabetes, hypertension, stroke, heart attacks and cancer. So much for Nutritional guidelines. Given the green light, breakfast became a sugar haven for children via colorful sugary cereals and other delights. Adults meanwhile pursued the sugar through cans full of colas to meet their Average Daily Requirement. The Legend had been printed and it took many a year to realize the damage done.

2. Blood Letting was the manifest therapy of most maladies, when a doctor was faced with an insurmountable illness and no known therapeutic modality was available and few were other than poltices. Sometime the first and last resort of action was “blood-letting.” But let us not judge too harshly, “blood-letting” started by the Egyptians in 1000BC and continued on till the setting sun of the 19thcentury. A lot of harm there was done, except for those with undiagnosed and in those times possibly unknown, patints with polycythemia or those with Hemochromatosis, those few might have been helped. This treatment might also have been the proximate cause of death for some Presidents of the United States, including George Washington.

True Science is about questioning. It is about the wrong questions not about the right answers that knowledge is furthered. It is about skepticism. It is about advancing the knowledge and not about prostrate obedience. Today, some crafty individuals have taken the mantle of establishing organizations for the sake of minting large sums of money from various segments of society using the art of pseudoscience. These carpetbaggers have a unique mechanism of action. They create a product in vacuum and then become the arbiters of expertise. They decide another’s aptitude based on false empiricism. These few have grafted themselves into positions of power and have merged with larger powers, by convincing others that they alone hold the right and might to determine what’s right. In so doing they have amassed large sums of money for themselves and used that accumulated wealth to further their plans through lobbying for more control. They cite their false legends (self-created body of information lacking scrutiny or veracity) and print them as fast as they can to parade them as evidence. They are indeed a body of falsehood and evil. One such example in the medical field is the false promise of continuous certification and the maintenance of such certification. These organizations are folded under the umbrella of the American Board of Medical Specialties and they are under fire for falsehoods, coercion and other bad acts against physicians in general. The ugly truth of their large sums of monies held in places offshore and the large salaries commanded by the few that work in this organization to keep this false enterprise going, is the premise of the multiple legal actions against them.

Then there is the influence of statistics in medicine, which has been of equal harm in patient care. Medicine is practiced mostly under the best known and available evidence. That evidence is both of scientifically validated in nature, as well as intuitively known to those practicing the art and science of medicine in caring for the patients on a daily basis. Unfortunately, as the tools of statistical rigors were massaged over time, and means of means became the means to determine benefit of certain medicines, intuition has atrophied under guide of guidelines and wisdom has become a shell of its former self.

Many if not most, bowed to the gods of statistics as more and more massaging of a poor result in empiricism was heralded as the Second Coming against disease. But as all things are shaped by time, this one too has lost favor under tighter scrutiny. More physicians are trying to dig into the roots of the given answer and not just the colored leaf shown. Meanwhile the creators of this logic continue to march and berate those that defy their “Evidence.” Unfortunately, the emergence of truth is never timely, yet it always raises itself in the face of unseemly and irreverent acts.

Science is meant to be questioned at every step of the way, not swallowed as a pill of satisfaction. It is to be teased, pulled apart piece by piece to unearth that which will hold verification and can then be validated until newer tools and information emerge. We as humans advance by standing on the shoulders of giants to see that which cannot be seen. And each giant of the field learned his or her wisdom peering at what others were doing or had done. Watson and Crick advanced the DNA helix, not through the force of epiphany but on the crystallographic radiograph by Rosalind Franklin. Marie Curie had Antoine Henri Becquerel to rely upon as her muse. There is passion and persistence in remarkable discoveries as there is passion and persistence in great art too. It took Leonardo Da Vinci 13 years to finish the “Mona Lisa” painting and get the face to smile and smirk at the same time.

The quick fix methodology of the pseudoscientist, who are forever in a hurry, because charlatans do not want to be exposed nor do they want to lose the prize, do not care for the truth. Their aim is the financial prize.

Indeed, above all question! No one has said it better than this wonderful physicist Richard Feynman, “I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned.”

HUMANS TRAPPED BY AUTOMATION

Our minds 

resolve to adapt to our surroundings fairly quickly. Imagine my surprise when the Air Asiana jumbo jet came crashing down on San Francisco's Runway 28L in pieces strewing metal and bodies all over the runway. It was a shock of disbelief. In this day and age where Auto throttle and Autoland features are redundant in the airliners, why would this happen?

The answer was quite simple, horrific as it was; The Pilots had relied on automation to the point of dependency. They had been managers most of their pilot life in the airlines and given the redundancy of the equipment and it’s stellar history, well, the corporate offices of the airlines, figured it better for the aircraft to do its magic without the interference from the pilot. Sure enough the Instrument Landing System on the SF Runway was out for maintenance and the pilots were given instructions for a straight-in “Visual Approach” to the Runway 28L, that they were unable to manage.

The excerpts below on Air Asiana flight #214 are from the NTSB: https://youtu.be/zTXDalv7kNQ

“The flight was vectored for a visual approach to runway 28L and intercepted the final approach course about 14 nautical miles (nm) from the threshold at an altitude slightly above the desired 3° glidepath. This set the flight crew up for a straight-in visual approach; however, after the flight crew accepted an air traffic control instruction to maintain 180 knots to 5 nm from the runway, the flight crew mismanaged the airplane’s descent, which resulted in the airplane being well above the desired 3° glidepath when it reached the 5 nm point. The flight crew’s difficulty in managing the airplane’s descent continued as the approach continued. In an attempt to increase the airplane’s descent rate and capture the desired glidepath, the pilot flying (PF) selected an autopilot (A/P) mode (flight level change speed [FLCH SPD]) that instead resulted in the autoflight system initiating a climb because the airplane was below the selected altitude. The PF disconnected the A/P and moved the thrust levers to idle, which caused the autothrottle (A/T) to change to the HOLD mode, a mode in which the A/T does not control airspeed. The PF then pitched the airplane down and increased the descent rate. Neither the PF, the pilot monitoring (PM), nor the observer noted the change in A/T mode to HOLD.

As the airplane reached 500 ft above airport elevation, the point at which Asiana’s procedures dictated that the approach must be stabilized, the precision approach path indicator (PAPI) would have shown the flight crew that the airplane was slightly above the desired glidepath. Also, the airspeed, which had been decreasing rapidly, had just reached the proper approach speed of 137 knots. However, the thrust levers were still at idle, and the descent rate was about 1,200 ft per minute, well above the descent rate of about 700 fpm needed to maintain the desired glidepath; these were two indications that the approach was not stabilized. Based on these two indications, the flight crew should have determined that the approach was unstabilized and initiated a go-around, but they did not do so. As the approach continued, it became increasingly unstabilized as the airplane descended below the desired glidepath; the PAPI displayed three and then four red lights, indicating the continuing descent below the glidepath. The decreasing trend in airspeed continued, and about 200 ft, the flight crew became aware of the low airspeed and low path conditions but did not initiate a go-around until the airplane was below 100 ft, at which point the airplane did not have the performance capability to accomplish a go-around. The flight crew’s insufficient monitoring of airspeed indications during the approach resulted from expectancy, increased workload, fatigue, and automation reliance.”

On the other side are the Lion Air and the more recent Ethiopian Airliners that were both struck with tragedy. Both seemed to be the result of a new automated system: The Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) is an automated safety feature on the 737 Max 8 designed to prevent the plane from entering into a stall, or losing lift.
https://phys.org/news/2019-03-ethiopian-airlines-mcas-boeing-max.html

The potential of the new automation seems to have played a part, at least in the Lion Air information and the flight paths and behavior of both aircraft, on Radar seem to be identical, indicating the ghost of the MCAS automation within the silicon chips may have created the maladies that either crew of the two airliners were untrained or unable to handle. Important to note, a flight crew had successfully interrupted the automation from the MCAS system in a previous flight prior to the Lion Air tragedy.

Lion Air:  
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-46373125

Ethiopian Airline: 
https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/10/africa/ethiopian-airlines-crash-boeing-max-8-intl/index.html

“Click, Click and Click, Click” is what the Chief Pilot of the American Airlines stated in this great video, “The children of the Magenta Line.” It is worth a watch and explanatory of our continuous dependence to a greater degree on automation.

https://vimeo.com/159496346?ref=tw-share

or click on the Blue icon "Watch on Vimeo"

Children Of The Magenta Line from SKYbrary on Vimeo.

Tesla on the ground seems to be having some trouble on the roadways as well. It seems that the cohabitation of robotics and humans has to be synchronized to the degree that both sides; the silicon chips and the Grey Matter, have defective understanding and that the Grey Matter side better be better prepared to reconcile any anomalies that might arise in the chip algorithm command. “Click, Click and Click, Click” to disconnect the Autopilot and fly by hand while resolving the anomaly.

The other side of this automation in keeping personal data safe is also wreaking havoc; routinely we hear of data breaches in the digital medical record keeping business. Millions have their personal data exposed those who will sell it for nefarious reasons. Increasingly the younger generation by a 55% margin seems to think that allowing giant digital corporations to know everything about their personal life is ok, since, they do “nothing wrong.” The fallacy of this thinking is blatant if one is to reason through. Innocence is determined by the current vogue in thinking. What is acceptable in the 2010s may be considered lunacy in the 2020s. So imagine your chagrin when all the “clouds” are combed over and voila, your innocent mischief is now considered a crime against humanity. The #Metoo scenario with the advent of past and present digital records is playing out even against those who initiated this form of societal justice. Real-Time video manipulations and other assorted nefarious tricks are creating animosity amongst the best of friends. Sad reality from such nefarious actions abound in the world today.

1. It is perhaps not necessarily being a luddite that one gains some protection, but from common sense usage of the grand scale digital universe. Keep your personal information to yourself. (FYI)

2. Personal Information in today’s world is equivalent to your life’s work and acquired assets.

3. Monitor Automation but don’t let it rule you.

4. Keep a healthy respect for all automation. Be it in aircraft, cars or even medical devices.

5. Remember the Software was written by humans.

6. When in doubt, OVERRIDE the automation.

7. A single nucleotide misplaced/inserted/ deleted can cause a calamity of cancerous proportions, so can a single digit inserted/deleted/misapplied can cause the algorithm to cause the robotic maneuver to stop dead in its tracks.

Above all learn the discipline of Reason and Critical Thinking. Life is short and Learning is fun. Read, write and spread that honest joy around.