developing post: why the current US patent process is broken

1. the USPTO grants lots of patents on the everyday engineering solutions that designers and engineers come up with to solve typical engineering challenges. this adds huge and unnecessary legal risks to firms creating and commercializing products.

2. patent law puts the burden on firms to determine whether their products infringe any patented concepts/implementations, yet most IP lawyers advise not doing any IP research before/during/after development and commercialization in order to to trigger 'willful infringement' provisions in current patent law.

3. even for firms that would like to find out before/during development how many dozens, hundreds, or thousands of aspects of their designs are already patented, there is no practical way to accomplish that goal now. Patents are written cryptically, using obscure legal language that can rarely be parsed even by the engineers who developed the ideas. Worse, there are no decent tools for efficiently finding patents in areas a firm might want to investigate. It is very unlikely that any US legislator or judge has a good grasp of how expensive in dollars and time it would be for a firm developing one product to fully vet the product for infringement before launching it.

4. the faulty filter at the USPTO creates a 'gladiator ring' dynamic for firms: even if they recognize the ethical and practical shortcomings of the patent system, if they want to survive they must fight in the ring. Fighting means (a) getting weapons (filing patent applications on anything and everything, and hoping some get granted whether they are non-obvious or not), and (b) using the weapons against the other gladiators in the ring (filing offensive litigation against other firms going about the business of developing and commercializing products). The gladiators would really rather not have to fight each other, but within the ring of business their weapons are only useful against each other, not Rome (the USPTO and inane circuit courts)


'facilitators' like IV will be a necessary evil to grease the skids of product development commercialization. Just as soon as our government stops granting monopoly rights to non-innovators, however, these guys are toast.

it would be an illuminating exercise to come up with a laundry list of obvious things that have been patented to show the extent of the issue.

as an aside, there is a population of web commenters who use lazy arguments about how companies 'steal' from other companies and 'freeload off other's R&D'. Nothing could be further from the truth in my experience - companies don't build products, product development teams composed of people create products, and rarely if ever do engineers and designers reverse engineer competing product software or services in order to copy implementation details. It would be an interesting study to try to track a truly novel idea that warrants a patent and follow the propagation of the idea through a population of engineers and designers that operate in the relevant domain, to validate whether people rip off competing products, or if not, how design patterns emerge from industry.

Purchases have consequences

In various posts here starting in 2004, I have argued that home prices in Seattle, and probably the US as a whole, were unsustainably inflated. Tim Ellis made the same arguments (but more regularly, and with more data) on his Seattle Bubble blog. The implications were obvious then, and more obvious now.

The causes should have been obvious as well, but various liberal thinkers and polemicists are drawing the wrong conclusions and using these conclusions to fuel the wrong arguments. They are blaming the banks that lent money. The culprits are closer to home.

My family elected to stay out of the market and rent while the market boiled, and I tried to encourage my friends and colleagues to do the same. This was not just out of self-interest, but because of the probable impact to every sector of the economy linked to home purchases. It turns out that every sector of the US economy of the mid and late 2000s was linked to home purchases. We all benefit from a healthy economy. We all have a responsibility to our families, but as citizens we also have a responsibility to the country and each other. During the real estate boom of the mid 2000s, I saw friends, colleagues, and strangers make choices that contributed to the bubble, and hence to the outcomes when the bubble burst.

I'll make my argument as concisely as I can: mortgage lenders, real estate agents, appraisers, real estate developers, politicians, and others in the real estate ecosystem played a supporting role in fueling the bubble, but the leaders of the bubble were the families and individuals that bought and sold homes during this period.

President Obama famously said 'elections have consequences'. The lesson of the last several years is that purchases have consequences. Home purchases during the boom have had terrible consequences for our country. Businesses have closed. Tens of millions of people that might have otherwise had productive jobs are unemployed. Perhaps 100M people have lost most of the net value in the largest source of wealth that they have - their homes. The nation and the states are out of money. The mood is sour. The range and depth of services that government provides are getting descoped significantly.

Americans have the luxury of choosing where to spend money. This is part of the foundation of liberty - the freedom of contract. Nearly every business works hard to win business (purchases) from customers by offering good products, describing the benefits of those products, and encouraging potential customers to patronize their establishments. In a nation of free men, free trade, and vibrant businesses, in nearly all transactions consumers get to decide where, when, and whether to buy goods and services. Businesses don't get to mandate that consumers make purchases.

The real estate boom is notable in that for the most part, consumers bought homes from other consumers. There is no other large sector of the economy where consumers purchase goods or services directly from other consumers. It's fashionable to try to blame Starbucks for selling expensive espresso drinks, and although even in this case consumers get to choose whether to buy or not to buy, it's a true business (Starbucks) trying to encourage consumers to make a purchase. In the case of most home sales, it's consumers (home owners) trying to sell their homes to other consumers (potential home buyers). Yes, there are plenty of enablers - agents, advertisers, lenders, appraisers, etc. But the primary decisions - whether to put the home for sale, what price to ask, what conditions are allowable on the transaction, and ultimately whether to execute a sale with a specific buyer, are all under the control of the private citizen who owns a home. And home buyers are under no mandate to buy, they have free will and no law enforcement officer or civil servant ordering them to purchase a home. Renting, leasing, living hotels - these are all valid options. Selling a home is also a discretionary decision. There may be pressure to sell a home for legitimate reasons, but the decision to sell is made by the seller. Even in the case of selling a home to 'enable' a move due to a job transfer, it's a discretionary decision to trade off some benefits for other benefits.

During the boom, I met and read commentary from a lot of people who were boom cheerleaders. But I don't believe that a single person privately doubted that at some point, the boom would fade. I saw a lot of fear - fears of being priced out of the market as it went up and up, fears from regular people of not taking advantage of the unusual opportunity to make a lot of money before the opportunity passed. I also saw a lot of raw covetousness, greed, and selfishness - vacations, cars, gadgets, renovations, and all kinds of purchases funded with mortgage refinancing and HELOCs. A lot of people buried their concerns about the sustainability of these shenanigans, but the aftertaste of irresponsibility was there in every boom-enabled purchase.

For the last several years, there hasn't been that much soul-searching among the citizenry about the culpability for these personal decisions. There has been a growing list of writers, thinkers, and public personalities pointing fingers at politicians and at banks for the financial catastrophe. This is wrong, and dangerous, because it minimizes the responsibilities that are a necessary part of the liberties we hold dear. As individual citizens, we've got to recognize the culpability that each of us that sold or bought homes has in causing this mess.

If we allow ourselves to be led into raising pitchforks against banks and bankers before we recognize and accept our culpability, we won't approach the changes we think need to be made outside of our homes with an adequate level of humility and camaraderie. I have yet to hear of a single parent who has said to their child, "I thought we could afford your new iMac and Honda when we sold the old house in 2006, but in reality I knew the price we got was too good to be true. If it hadn't been for this inflated price we wouldn't have been able to pay for them then, and we shouldn't have bought them in the first place." I haven't heard a single home buyer get up at a town hall meeting and tell their city council, "I knew I was paying an inflated price for my home in 2007, and this contributed a 'comp' to the tax appraiser's assessments in our neighborhood, which probably went right in to an artificially high budget forecast for our town, which is why we're here today talking about why the city park has to close." Home buyers haven't started writing editorials in their local newspapers (or even on their blogs) accepting a modicum of responsibility for taking down our country's economy.

The Americans who lived through the Great Depression earned a reputation for thrift from those of us who came much later. For now, I can't see any recognition from contemporary Americans about their actions in this latest depression. We can't responsibly rebuild our economies and public finances until we consider our motivations and shortcomings, own up to our contributions, and change our hearts and minds about the causes and effects of this situation.

j

Living in Taipei

I moved with my family to Taipei, Taiwan earlier this year, and took a new job with a new company. This is my first post this calendar year.

Taipei is a little exotic, but I like it. I'm hoping that after I finish recruiting the team I'm building, launch our v1 product, and get the planning for the next release under way, that I'll have some more time to read, blog, and travel around the country. It's a beautiful island full of new mountains, geothermal features, windy roads, and remote beaches ... and I've only really left the city four times in ~6 months.

j

Bilski, and why any contemporary software patent is likely a crap patent

This is just a stub for now; I wanted to get this down as a placeholder and expound on this later.

Most of the software patents I've analyzed, and this is more than a few, make their central claims about solutions to engineering challenges. If I had asked one of the hundreds of software developers I've worked with over the last decade to come up with several potential options to any of these challenges, I'm certain they would have identified the models and mechanisms these patents claim as 'innovative'. I'm even more certain that these professional software developers would have faced no serious, insurmountable obstacles to implementing their proposed solutions in code.

This is the heart of my objection to the current state of software patents in the US - most companies try, and succeed, in obtaining patent protection for useful but not innovative, solutions to contemporary challenges. If an average software developer identifies and implements a solution to a challenge during the normal course of a product development cycle, this solution should not, by definition, be patentable - and the incentives for firms to seek protection for these products of the typical development process should be eliminated immediately.

my first podcast

I've passed up various opportunities over the years to speak in public, for various reasons, including opportunities to do podcasts. But this week I yielded to the inevitable and had a public, live chat with Randy Ksar from Motorola's developer community team.

It was more fun than I thought it would be, but to be perfectly honest I felt fairly constrained in what I could talk about, and how natural and dynamic the discussions were with the folks asking questions over the phone and by twitter.

I'm gearing up to present a longer version of this podcast topic, but live and in person on stage in San Diego in two weeks. It's been a while since I've spoken on stage, but the topic is interesting (to me at least, and hopefully for the audience) and I've asked a colleague from the engineering team to jointly present so that we can structure the session as a dialogue rather than a soliloquy.

One of the aspects that struck me a few days after this podcast is how anything I say or do online is now practically a 'reference work'. People have talked about this for years, but it's really hitting home for me now: things I say or do, or things other people post to the web that I've said or done, will be there ... more or less forever. I'm not so sure this is a good development.

j

The hidden tax in your cell phone bill, and why operator retail is anti-competitive

If you have a mobile phone from AT&T or T-Mobile, or Verizon or Sprint, or Alltel or MetroPCS or Cricket, you're paying a tax that you very likely don't see on your bill. It's not a government tax. It's the device subsidy tax.

Practically every American with a cell phone bought that phone at the same store where they signed up for their cellular service - their phone number, minutes, text messaging plans, etc. Something like 95%+ of Americans who have 1-2 year cell phone contracts bought their cell phone at a discount by committing to another 1-2 year service commitment.

And why would you pay the full, 'without a contract' price for a phone when it's available at a much cheaper price with a contract, and hey, you're going to need service anyway? If the operator will subsidize the cost, why not take the savings?

This should hardly be surprising given a few seconds of thought, but AT&T is not subsidizing your iPhone, and Verizon Wireless is not subsidizing your Blackberry. They are not bearing the cost of your cell phone on your behalf. They simply include this cost, aggregated and averaged across their customer base, in the prices they charge for service. You pay the 'device subsidy' in monthly installments, as a hidden part of your bill.

Here's the catch, and the reason this device installment payment plan is really a kind of tax: you can't avoid paying it, even if you don't need or want it. The operators don't offer voice or data or texting service plans that exclude this amortized hardware charge. Sprint doesn't have a 900 minute per month 'bring your own device' plan for $15 less than the standard 900 minute per month plan. AT&T doesn't have an iPhone voice and data plan for people who bought secondhand iPhones - at least not a plan that costs less than the regular iPhone plans, which include a hefty per-month premium to offset part of the up-front cost of buying a new iPhone.

Nope, if you just want to keep using your current phone, or bought a new or used phone somewhere else, you won't pay any less than the person who signs up for a plan and gets a reduced-price phone. Part of your monthly bill will be paying the monthly installment charge for that other person's phone.

This isn't merely unfair, it borders on being anti-competitive. It's not coincidence that nearly everyone in the US buys their phone from the same people who sell the service. The operators desperately want to control where, how, and under what conditions you buy your phone. And every single one of them in the US has only one type of plan - the 'we include the cost of your hardware' plan. Every single one. Because phones really are rather expensive, even in 2009, Americans have been been lulled into accepting the bargain from the operators, and have become accustomed to only paying up front for part of the cost of their phones.

It matters where you buy your phone, because different retailers configure the same phone models differently. If you buy your phone from AT&T, it comes with locks you might not be aware of - it will be locked to only operate when an AT&T SIM card is in the phone (and not, of course, a T-Mobile SIM), and it will have the 'administrator' for the phone set to AT&T. When you buy a Dell from Best Buy, Best Buy isn't configured as the administrator account, and Best Buy doesn't use that administrator account to set rules on what applications you are allowed to install, or how you use your computer. But AT&T does this on your phone, so that 'the network is protected'.

Now if you were to buy the exact same model of phone from Nokia.com, or Amazon, or one of the lesser known 'pure-play' phone retailers, none of these locks would be present. You could use a SIM from any operator and the phone will operate. You can install any application that you want. You could update the phone software with newer versions without breaking the law or voiding your warranty.

But buying phones from retailers other than the operators is horribly expensive - normally $150-$400 more expensive than buying the same phone from the operator. It's a classic bundling scheme. And there isn't an 'unbundled' option - actually there is an unbundled option, at least at AT&T and T-Mobile, and the service costs exactly the same as the full bundle.

Until one of the major operators offers a lower priced bring-your-own-device option, you will continue to buy your phone from their stores. They've blocked the non-operator retail channel from competing, since a phone without service is pretty much useless.

j

Craigslist API

I haven't seen a single shred of news about an upcoming Craigslist API, or any hints from friends. But when I pulled up the Seattle CL site this morning I noticed in the status bar in Firefox that I was redirected back and forth several times between craigslist.api.beta.com and seattle.craigslist.com.

Interesting.

CL has been the most notable API hold-out and data access curmudgeon - they aggressively block anyone who tries to aggregate their information across sites/markets, and even some fairly innocent mashups. If they are trialling an API ... especially in this down market when bartering and used goods sales are probably going way up ... that would be very interesting.

j

Google Android and open source

When I was at Microsoft I heard a lot about the evils of free open source software. I didn't buy all of the arguments, and haven't thought about this much in a couple of years.

I've been dealing with Google a fair bit in my current role, and I hear about open source pretty much every day. The Android team at Google seems to love open source. They've built an entire mobile operating system, made most of it open source, and don't charge anything for the client license if you want to ship a product.

And they want the folks who work with them to contribute their code to open source. They want my firm to lean on our third party vendors to offer their stuff to open source. Open source means free. Open source means that anyone can use it, modify it, and ship it.

On a call today we were discussing a very specific example, and the horror of open source hit me square in the face. Google would prefer to work with developers who will contribute their work to open source. Most developers have a hard enough time making money from their applications, and Google wants them to give away the fruit of their labor. I'm not sure that Google cares about how the developer is supposed to make money - or maybe they do, and assume that the developer will make money through peripheral means. Like advertising.

jason

Gearing up to buy a home

There's confusion and volatility in the local housing market. Prices are dropping, but at hugely different rates depending on the listing.

It's about time.

I'm going house shopping.

j

As-built versus design intentions

There are a lot of people who have "product management" titles. In my experience there is a smaller number of people who have experience managing products, and who have learned some of the basic lessons.

My first internship was at a nuclear plant in Florida, where I spent part of the summer climbing around the innards of the plant inspecting piping and mechanical systems. It was hot, somewhat dirty work, with a lot of very boring clerical aspects. But I learned one valuable lesson - there's a reason engineers inspect every aspect of a big system that's just been constructed: what gets built doesn't usually match the designs and plans. I logged dozens of instances where pipe hangers weren't where the blueprints said they were supposed to be, or even where the 'latest' document change requests said they were supposed to be. Sometimes I even found valves that were installed in a different orientation than the docs described, or pipe that was of a different grade than the specs claimed.

Designs are critically important, but they aren't the gospel - when engineers and fabricators are building something, often times adjustments have to be made to account for real-world issues that surface. In a well-run engineering org, someone will capture the changes to the design docs, and the existence of a change will be noted on the original docs. A lot of systems are maintained over time, however, and sometimes in the process of servicing or repairing a system element a change in the configuration or design will be made, and sometimes those changes aren't documented and referenced in the design docs.

I don't work on big, multi-billion dollar nuclear power plants at the moment, for the last eight years I've been mostly a software planner and marketer. My specialty seems to be mobile operating systems, I'm now in a new role planning yet another smartphone OS. Operating Systems are arguably just as complex as a the mechanical systems in a nuclear plant, and over multiple releases a lot of good intentions add layer upon layer of entanglement to the pristine original designs. Software is much more ephemeral than mechanical systems, and harder to inspect. Sometimes a new component will be added in V3 of an OS that supercedes a function of a component introduced in V1, and the architects and developers will forget while planning v4 that some system resource uses that function from the V1 component, make a change, and silently break something. QA normally picks up issues like this, but since an OS is by definition a platform upon which other people will build apps, and is also a stateful machine with *a lot* of possible configurations, it's impossible to test every angle.

Which brings me back to my original observation - that not all product managers have learned the basic lessons of managing a product through the development life cycle. I've noticed that a lot of PdMs read the marketing requirements docs and feature specifications and product docs that the developers used up front in building the product as 'gospel' for what was actually delivered. That's a mistake. A good product manager, especially one managing a multi-generational product or a platform product/service, should maintain an as-built doc that reflects the details and limitations of the completed product. Or at the very least, a product manager should be aware of the reality that between planning and delivery a lot of decisions are made that can affect the features and performance of their product. And for product managers working with engineering teams that use an Agile-like development process, the need to author as-built docs is even more critical, given the inherently iterative and winding path that these 'chunked' developement efforts follow.

j

Operators and connected netbooks

I'm in the center of a bit of a situation at work between Google and AT&T, and it's both uncomfortable and enlightening.

Mobile operators seem to want to control all the important aspects of the handsets they sell to consumers. I'm reading through a 1200+ page requirements document at the moment that describes in excruciating detail what any given handset must adhere to in order for AT&T to consider assorting said device. 1200 pages. That's nearly as long as Tolstoy's War & Peace. Some operators go even further, though, and actually design phones themselves.

Many people over the years have lamented this situation; it's one of the fundamental aspects of the wireless industry that mobile operators, in many markets including the US, control most of the distribution of phones to consumers, and they set the rules on what devices they will assort. When was the last time you purchased a phone that wasn't branded with an AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, or other operator's logo? Each time you buy one of these devices, you help strengthen the operator's hold on the sales channel, and they use this position as the default source for phones (not their position as the folks who run the cellular network) to set and enforce very prescriptive and not always consumer-friendly requirements on phone designs. People don't buy unlocked devices (which are typically the 'pure' variant of a given phone model and closest to the planner's and designer's vision, unencumbered by changes to comply with operator requirements) for a very simple reason - they are far, far more expensive, because there's no operator subsidy applied to an unlocked device.

My latest phone is currently listed for $99 at T-Mobile, and ~$300 from online retailers. The $99 version has T-Mobile branding, can only run applications certified by T-Mobile, and has a number of differences from the $300 version driven by T-Mobile's requirements. The $300 version is SIM-unlocked, so you can use it with any SIM card and GSM service, it's application-unlocked so you can install and use any application you'd like, and it comes configured with themes, ringtones, applications, etc. that I picked out along with the industrial and UI design team to match the style we were going for with the phone as a whole. I would expect that the $99 version will probably outsell the $300 version by about 200:1.

Imagine if the only way you could buy an Apple iPod Touch was to buy the device at Circuit City, and the folks at Circuit City forced Apple to modify the iPod Touch to suit their requirements, resulting in a Circuit City-branded Nano in a nice burnt maroon color, that can only play music bought from a Circuit City music store (and none of your music ripped from CDs), and that works on a WiFi connection from a Circuit City internet service partner. Oh, you'd like an iPod Nano instead? Well, Circuit City doesn't sell those (in this example), you can only buy those from Amazon. And the Amazon iPod Nano is only available in Amazon orange, and only plays music bought from the Amazon MP3 store. People in Thailand can buy a fully Apple iPod Touch or Nano in a range of colors, that will work with any music you've got, and have cool wireless web browsers that aren't on the US versions, but these exotic foreign iPods cost three times as much and don't have a warranty valid in the US. And they come with weird foreign power cords. And insead of chosing from a new iPod model every year, Apple only came out with new models every two years. In this alternate iPod universe you might not see nearly as many people walking down the street with white Apple earbud headphones as you actually see here in the real world.

I'm starting to see a crack in the system, though - netbooks and laptops with built-in cellular modems. Until recently if you wanted to buy a computer with a built-in cellular connection you skipped checking out the operator stores, because they didn't carry these kinds of devices. Now some of the operators carry netbooks with built-in cellular modems, and they've even started to apply subsidies to reduce the up-front cost to purchase these devices - as long as you sign up for a contract for service to connect your netbook to the cellular network.

I can't imagine that many consumer would be interested in buying a portable computer from their phone company if that computer imposed more restrictions than a computer available from a regular electronics retailer, even if the price is a little lower. If this is true, then the rationale for treating handsets differently from connected computers will likely erode over time. Which would help people in postions like mine spend more time planning products that excite consumers, and less time filling out muliple byzantine requirements compliance matrices and planning features that placate operator desires for control.

j

Blogging once a week for over five years

I just realized that I've been maintaining this blog for over five years, and have averaged a little over one post per week - I'm coming up on my 400th post.

I've really got to spend a bit of time revising the layout; the standard Blogger templates are fine, but boring. And narrow. The world has moved to widescreen displays, yet my Blogger template would work just fine on an SVGA monitor circa 1995. I've got CS3, some (rusty) HTML skills, and blogging tools seem to have improved since I started, it's time to polish my site just a bit.

j

The US auto bailout

The NYT is reporting this afternoon that Republicans in the Congress have decided not to support the $14B initial tranche of investments brokered by President Bush and Congressional Democrats. Given that the Congress is set to go on break tomorrow for the Christmas holiday, and GM and Chrysler have said that they lack the free cash to remain solvent through the holidays, it appears that they might finally be pushed into declaring bankruptcy.

So this flyer, which I saw in several forwarded emails, might not come to pass:



It's very, very unfortunate that the US auto industry has failed, but it has indeed failed. Producing product isn't enough to be 'successful', a for-profit company also needs to make efficient use of capital and produce a profit, and General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler have ceased to produce enough surplus to sustain their operations.

I don't believe that the these three firms will simply dissolve, there are too many gems in their rubble to shut down their entire operations. I would expect that investors will buy the Special Vehicle team from Ford, as well as the Mustang brand and possibly development team, the Corvette brand and development team from GM, the light truck development team from Ford, etc. Perhaps some well-armed investor will buy the most interesting bits from each of the three companies and form a super-marque composed of just those cars and trucks that are still profitable and still in demand.

Look at the example of Porsche - this tiny little maker of high performance vehicles has profitably run their operations for decades, and managed their finances and investments very, very well. This year they launched the opening gambit in a a strategy to buy the Volkswagon group, which briefly pushed VW's share price up to the point that VW was the most valuable company in the world. A well run specialty maker can be profitable, and perhaps this is what we need in the US.

If by some stroke of manuevering Congressional Democrats and the Obama folks force a compromise, and the Big 3 are bailed out, they will almost certainly impose their own ideological agenda on these car makers, and this will very likely result in reduced investments in the very brands and products that are still profotable and sustainable. For the sake of all involved, I hope that no deal is brokered, the the Big 3 head into bankruptcy, and one or more private investors buy the good parts of these companies and form a smaller, more focused automaker that serves the demands of the market - and not the demands of politicans.

j

Cosmological observations

I love astrophysics (and physics in general), and all of the complicated and beautiful forms of matter that we see out in space. Since I first read popular physics books on black holes and pulsars while I was in middle school I've been fascinated by the principles by which these objects take their form and propagate their effects.

Once I learned higher maths in college and graduate school, however, I began to develop a silent but subtle lack of comfort in the many multivariate and multidimensional physics model that astrophysicists were formulating to describe what we observe in space. Until this week I hadn't mentioned this discomfort to anyone, or written about it.

Linear algebra is a far too simple mathematical form to describe the complexity of physics in space (or on Earth), but my discomfort can probably be best described using algebra as an example. If you have 5 variables that are mathematically related to each other, you need 5 distinct equations relating those variables in order to be able to solve the system of equations. But 5 is just an example, the general rule is that you need Z equations to solve for Z variables.

With all of the complex models that we've developed over the years to describe fundamental physics, including general and special relativity, quantum, the cosmological constant, strings operating in Calabi-Yao spaces, grid theory, etc., and all of the increasingly detailed and complex models we've created to try to describe what we observe in the far reaches of the universe, including stellar formation, stellar collapse, gravitational lensing, red-shift, etc., I wonder if along the way we haven't created more complex models than the data should justify.

When we look into the heavens, we're observing electromagnetic radiation of one wavelength or another. A *lot* of measurements of the universe have been taken, using instruments gathering data across a very wide band of electromagnetic frequencies - microwave, t-ray, ultraviolet, the visible spectrum that our eyes can discern, infrared, radio, etc. And clever astronomers and astrophysicists have used various physical phenomena like massive stars to augment our view of the farthest reaches of the universe. But our Earth takes a pretty small lap around the sun, if you compare our orbit to the size of the universe, or even just the size of the Milky Way, and this has a serious impact on our ability to observe far-away stars and galaxies and such in three dimensions. We rely on inferences drawn from our postulated models of the physics of the universe to add data on the third dimension (distance from Earth, and speed approaching or receding from Earth) to these flat two dimension images our cameras snap. We also estimate the size, mass and distance from Earth of far-away stars using our models of physics, and many more detailed estimates like the age and energy of these stars. We use this data to help determine how these stars distort our observations of the stars behind them (along our line of sight).



The point here is that we create high-order models of the positions, speeds, acceleration, age, energy, and numerous other attributes of nearly all the luminous (and some non-luminous) objects we observe in space drawn from the light we gather. And from these individual stars and other objects we create models of the current universe as a whole, and further models that try to describe how the universe has developed over time, and will develop in the future. Some physicists even add to this model of the universe an 'ether' we now call the 'grid' (the grid is supposed to exist even in an absolute vacuum). But all of the individual variables in these models are all related: distance and size are related, as are distance and luminosity, speed and mass, mass and age, age and distance, etc. I wonder if we haven't created a really big cosmological-physical model with more variables than the data can justify.

j

Beliefs and the afterlife

I've been thinking about a basic question lately. A question that I've never seen voiced elsewhere but that seems elementary to forming an individual's world view.

There are a lot of different beliefs that various people hold about what happens after the human body has died. Some of these beliefs include simple decay of the body as the final process, reincarnation of an individual's soul into a new earth-bound life form, judgement by Jesus and disposition of one's soul to Heaven or Hell, absorption of an individual's life force back into an earthly pool of spiritual energy, the emergence of a massless and invisible soul set free to roam the earth indefinitely, judgement by Allah and disposition of one's soul to Paradise or Hell, rebirth into another universe, reincarnation as a more powerful being but in a massless and invisible form, etc.

Some people are unsure of what, if anything, will happen to them after their bodies die, but this isn't a view, just an uncertainty of the truth or likelihood of any particular possibility. But others place more weight on the likelihood or evidence for specific after-death options, and while while they might express less than absolute certainty that they know what will happen to them when they die, expect a specific outcome after their body dies.

So here's my question:

Does the belief that any particular person holds about what will happen to them after their body dies have any impact on turning that belief into reality?

If a man in India believes that he will be reborn in a different body after his original body dies, does his belief somehow impact the physical world even after his body has died? If I believe that a god named Jesus will judge my actions and beliefs about his existence and holiness and adjudicate my soul to a singular Heaven or Hell after my body has died, does my belief in Jesus before my death somehow sustain or bring into existence Jesus and his Heaven and Hell? 

If a woman in California believes that she has intrinsic life energy, is this belief alone sufficient to instantiate actual metaphysical life energy and perpetuate the existence of this energy after the woman dies? If a boy in the Philippines believes that after his body dies he will be reborn as a superhero-like demigod, does the physical and metaphysical manifestation of his belief have any chance of instantiating an actual superhero rebirth? If I believe that I will return as a leprechaun after I die, does some physical or metaphysical aspect of 'me' act as an agent to catalyze the creation of a leprechaun imbued with my soul at some point after my body begins to decay?

I suggest that the answer to this question is no, an individual's beliefs about the afterlife do not somehow will into existence a physical and metaphysical afterlife constructed according to the individual's views. Humans cannot through intellectual processes alone impact the physical world while we are alive, so why should our ability to will conditions into existence grow after our brains have ceased functioning, and in ways that operate outside of the physical universe?

The answer to this question leads to other questions. If our view of the afterlife doesn't have any impact on the reality of our personal disposition after our bodies die, and we are powerless to will our beliefs into reality, then perhaps it is in each man's interest to determine whether there is evidence that points towards a specific process and reality after his body dies. 

I posed this question to an acquaintance, and she told me she believes that the answer to the question is yes, that the details and fervor of her belief will catalyze the release of her life energy into a universal reservoir of life energy, and that my beliefs, whatever they are, will be realized and instantiated partly through the fact of my belief. I asked her whether she thought that her belief in the existence of a pool of spiritual energy could have any tangible impact of the disposition of my body and soul after I die, and she told me that she didn't think her views would have any impact on my reality. I didn't ask her whether she had given any thought to the possibility of creating for herself an afterlife fashioned according to her own desires.

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