Two day and the gym still moderately sparse. And while the podcast episodes today – Science – were not particularly sticky – except Smolin’s discourse on time – I did come to a couple of pre-Wednesday realizations:
That’s all, folks!
Mundane day is back. And joyously! No noise pollution courtesy of the city parents, and the gym was delightfully sparse. The podcast was another episode of the CBC’s “Best of Ideas” series on secularity and it was quite good, finally getting around to the advancements in society being directly the result of increasing secularity and the inherent controlling nature of organized religion. And the evil (?) of fundamentalism. There was even a bit of humor about the latter which is rather refreshing for one who lives in the religionist pig pen of the old Confederacy. They even talked about how the obsession with end times is a direct fallout of reconstruction.
On a more intriguing azimuth I ran across an article [Link] about the half-century anniversary of the beginnings of the study of chaotic behavior. Unlike James Glick and others I am not quite comfortable with calling it Chaos since the origin of the term is non-STEM. I also had to reflect that much of the original maths development, especially with the classic logistic differential equation, was simply bad maths. That was always a problem for me, on the one hand the finite difference maths types talking about error propagation and instabilities of too large a step size and the chaotic behavior folks talking about BOOM! behavior at step sizes far beyond the stable. Why, I wondered, couldn’t they get their stories straight?
Also intriguing is an article [Link] about an academic study that indicates human intelligence has decreased since the reign of Victoria. This is another brick in the wall that suggests that technology makes us stupid. Not that we didn’t know that, but it is nice to have it made sorta official.
Now we just have to wait for the politician to pass legislation that makes it illegal for us to not be stupid.
We come to ice cream day, the christianist pseudo-shabat, which is appropriate since it portends to be a cold day. My Firefox weather add-in indicates that it is 28 degF in Greater Metropolitan Arab right now and the temperature will rise to all of 45 degF. This is a mixed bag, if accurate. We are starting off at lower temperature than yesterday but we have the carrot of higher maximum than yesterday.
Speaking of yesterday, FD SCP drug me out to go shopping for a new motorcar for her. This was not a pleasant experience. I was repeatedly whelmed by blatantly incompetent salesmen (no women?) who project greed and fraud, when they are not mentally drooling. I suppose I am spolied by having bought my last few motorcars in Nawth Alibam’s Shining City on the Hill where the salesmen are used to dealing with techies and knowing that appearing stupid and boggish will cost them a sale. But FD SCP wants to obtain service for her motorcar here in Greater Metropolitan Arab and the dealer we finally settled on is the least worst of a horrible lot. At least statistically.
It may be asked why I would choose to live in a town of such blatant and bottomless incompetence, what with salesmen who mentally drool and city governance by real estate agents. The reason is simple; the distractions may be safely ignored leaving one to concentrate on important stuff, like physics. Knowing that the salesmen are incompetent and venial and cheats means that one can safely ignore their noise and decide whether the inflated price and inferior good are good enough to not waste more time over. And knowing that the city government values only people who do not live in the city means that one is free of concern over city politics and machinations. Sometimes, if the evil is small enough and inept enough, it is better to ignore it into a corner than consume one’s substance eradicating it.
This is the rule in small town Amerika, especially here in the hinterland. In fact, compared to Atlanta, Nawth Alibam’s Shining City on the Hill is similarly corrupt and competence-shy. I have long hypothesized that this differential of competence, if not greed and fraud, is why the young get attracted in such numbers to the cities, and why so many of them die young – in the cities. Cities have always been death mills of the young, going back to their beginnings. The competence draws them in and the greed takes them apart.
The other nasty piece of this, of which I have been reminded several times this week, is the idea of ‘cold’. Cold is nonsense, like the multipliers of less that have become fashionable in advertisements. There is no such thing as cold except in the minds of humans who should know better but apparently naturally drool between the ears. But since it seems fitting both in terms of our theme and in keeping with the weather, we shall discuss cold.
The human body is a heat engine. The heat is essentially a waste product like feces and urine. Since it is produced (approximately) continuously, it must be disposed of in the same fashion. The rate of heat transfer from the body to the environment depends on several factors including both the body and environment temperature. If the temperature difference is too low, our body retains heat and be become ‘hot’. This piece makes a bit of sense. But if the temperature difference is too great, then heat is pulled out faster than efficiency permits and we experience some metabolic stuttering that we interpret as ‘cold’. The most obvious of this is shivering which is as attempt by muscles to increase the body’s generation of heat.
So ‘cold’ is not only a purely human, unphysical thing, but manifest evidence of the prevalence of boggishness among humans.
Which brings us to the key question: is the mental drool of salesmen also manifest evidence of boggishness?
Week in resumed! Back to gym. The podcast an episode of CBC’s “Best of Ideas” dealing with the evils of coal. And the first of a two-parter.
The podcast started off with an implied indictment of coal capitalism, that mine collapses are the result only of stinginess and safety avoidance, and then rolled on to a discourse on environment and climate change. That latter was also an indictment of capitalism for benefiting from not paying the replacement cost of natural (i.e., exhaustible) resources and for adequate programs of warming abatement.
But at least the part on warming per se was wishy washy, better reflecting the uncertainty of science at the price of strengthening the rich and denialists.
It struck me in all this that civilization is neotenous.
neoteny n 1: an evolutionary trend to be born earlier so that development is cut off at an earlier stage and juvenile characteristics are retained in adults of the species
That is, tending towards permanently pre-pubescent – childlike – non-adult.
Simply put, adulthood is all about accepting responsibility for survival. Civilization is counter-adulthood. When you live in cities you don’t have to hunt or gather, you don’t have to contend with ravenous predators (although there are predators of a different form but actually few in number,) and you can pursue activities that are counter-survival absent civilization. Like games and comic books and superhero movies and ……… Hobbies have become more important than avocations, entertainment more important than jobs. Even education has been reduced to pieces of paper rather than knowledge and skills.
It’s also no wonder that the folks who do best in today’s society, the STEMS, and justicers and medicalists, are artificially divorced from society in an environment that is simpler and counter-realistic. Except that we keep trying to define that environment as realistic. And of course, there’s religionism. And we’ve suddenly found that those with Autism can almost get by on their own.
And it’s fragile without our being able to contend with that fragility. There are too many of us so no one can accomplish anything. Why, even our politicians tell us that wanting us to be good little nebbishes. And to die early by living in cities.
Not much to relate this morning. Rather coolish this morning compared to last week and what is foretold for later this week, one more evidence of the increased weather variance from increased mean temperature (energy.)
Allergies have been hideous all weekend, and continuing this morning. Hard to be cognitive when you are looking at things through a veil of tears. Does offer some insight into the progress of humanity. If we have been plagued with the natural impediments of illness and infirmity it was not just the creation of a critical mass of relevant information that was necessary for any technological and social advance, but also means of freeing ourselves of the distraction of these petty and seemingly ubiquitous maladies.
Incidentally, I have come to the hypothesis that tear formation is emergent, an example of complexity, but I have not yet had occasion, or attention span, to develop a specific model.
OK, it is official. Civilization has just changed. Drastically.
Seems that the folks who publish the Encyclopedia Britannica will no longer publish a paper version.[Link][Link] This comes as a scant surprise. I read in article that they sell the thing for 1.4E3 $Amerikan and only expected (maximum) to sell 1.2E4 sets this year. That’s less than the annual budget for Greater Metropolitan Arab, which is saying a great deal given how no monies are spent in Arab unless there is some expectation of attracting NEW taxpayers. One of the benefits of government by real estate agents.
I should comment that despite its fame and glory, EB never sold that many encyclopedias. They had to transition, organizationally, to other sources of revenue sometime not long after the cessation of the Great Patriotic War. But their fortunes were and are still tied to that information bashing activity and we should be wise (OK, the bogs get a pass on that one) to retain that in mind.
Two of the reasons for this are: (1) the EB is big! consider this photograph
Most of the encyclopedias sold in the Yankee republic were sold in grocery stores. The second source was door-to-door salesmen. So when the latter died as a sales medium, so did EB since they wouldn’t do business with Publix or Red Lion. And the encyclopedias you got in grocery stores were cheap in price, binding, and writing quality but they were still easier to read than EB. And while these peaked in the sixties, what has died is the basic idea of what an encyclopedia does.
Simply put, an encyclopedia serves as a condensate of a real library that you can have in your home. No need to done a morning suit and summon the carriage to drive to the library to look up something. Now you just walk into the smoking room and pull a volume of encyclopedia off the (well built and not sagging) shelves. That’s it. The encyclopedia is indoor plumbing. It’s a convenience. And we don’t need it any more because we have microcomputers and the internetwork.
Or so we think. What got lost here is the trust factor. When you bought an EB, or a World Book, or any other reputable encyclopedia (i.e., one not sold in a supermarket,) you were buying a product that had some intellectual integrity behind it and so you trusted it even thought you couldn’t verify. And now we trust the internet. WHich is an even deeper delusion, but that’s the way the world is these days.
I grew up with encyclopedias. Read my way through five sets before I was eleven years of age. Gave me an education that the public shules failed at. And when I got to be an adult with a revenue stream, I bought an EB. And I couldn’t read it even with college degrees. But I could dip into it as I needed to, on things not in my fields of study, and learn. And I lost it in a house fire around the turn of the century.
And the EB folks rescued me. They sold me EB on a CD (later a DVD). And it was good. So long as I ran WINDERS. Now I still buy EB on DVD and wrestle with WINE. But I also consult Wikipedia, but only for what is not in the EB. Because Wikipedia is not only not trustworthy, but it is even more poorly written than EB.
So as long as the EB folks publish the EB on DVD, I am good, and the rest of Tellus can turn into slime mold for brains trusting the Internetwork. Apres moi.
Have you ever put jello on a plate and left it out, looking at it every ten minutes or so? That’s what I am talking about.
But it’s no big thing, because that’s how most folks were anyway. From the get go. Week old, unrefrigerated jello. Between the ears.
That almost ideal of days, a rainy winter sundae, seems to be upon us. We shall see. And in the province of shall see, it is time to peer into old tabs and eradicate them either immediately or after snide commentary.
On which note, this article [Link] indicates that Apple continues to lose market share in the tablet azimuth. The article claims “Apple’s market share in the tablet arena dropped from 64 percent in Q3 to 57 percent in Q4, with Amazon nabbing a 14 percent share.” Since we don’t know Amazing previous take, the comparison is incomplete which implies that the survey firm is being less than objective and altruistic. And I am sitting here amazed that I actually used the words “firm”, “objective”, and “altruistic” in connection. Must be due to the soothing effect of the precipitation?
I feel rather conflicted on this. After all, it is a matter of which master the possessors – given the nonsense of modern licensing it is less than clear that one can own a tablet, especially an Apple one – serve? As is so often the case with modern society and corporations, terminology is inverted. Vendors used to offer service; now they claim that to assure they are serviced with cash flow. Modern licensing and contracts are one form of the current slavery. And that neither political party in the Yankee republic will even acknowledge it is an indication they are as much slaves of corporations as the citizenry.
Next, via NASA through the Scientific American, [Link] indications that we may not be able to blame soccer moms (and their mommy vans) for global climate change. It seems that the cause may track back to the end of the last cold phase when we humans began to seriously experiment with sedentarism. And, of course, agriculture, which was necessary when we killed off all the animals for a day or so walk around.
I cannot help but be reminded of that quote of the first Lord Wellington, “if there is something of which I know nothing, it is agriculture.” Not necessarily believable given the period and his profession, but it seems that we are again presented with some new information about an old subject. And we shall get to observe how wildly the politicians deny that farming is part of the reason the species may be doomed.
On a more enjoyable branch, the same disreputable rag offers us a guest blog [Link] speculating on the role of beer in that sedentary process. Sitting still started so we could have more possessions, stuff, Burns’ ‘gear’, and that leads us down a path where beer could occur accidentally and then drive us to the cultivation of wheat. Not completely digestible but definitely palatable. The story, that is.
Regretfully, it is still a bit early for me to do beer. Never has been one of my morning libations.
And lastly, a lovely article [Link] on why the Gnome folks have wondered off into some sort of la-la land and have ceased to pay attention to what users want? Is this some sort of corporate greed or merely artistic fascism? It is often hard to tell, especially in our modern world. The good news is that it is recognized and numerous contraries efforts are under way. But it seems strange that we can unify over how out GU Is work and not over our own freedoms?
That almost ideal of days, a rainy winter sundae, seems to be upon us. We shall see. And in the province of shall see, it is time to peer into old tabs and eradicate them either immediately or after snide commentary.
On which note, this article [Link] indicates that Apple continues to lose market share in the tablet azimuth. The article claims “Apple’s market share in the tablet arena dropped from 64 percent in Q3 to 57 percent in Q4, with Amazon nabbing a 14 percent share.” Since we don’t know Amazing’s previous take, the comparison is incomplete which implies that the survey firm is being less than objective and altruistic. And I am sitting here amazed that I actually used the words “firm”, “objective”, and “altruistic” in connection. Must be due to the soothing effect of the precipitation?
I feel rather conflicted on this. After all, it is a matter of which master the possessors – given the nonsense of modern licensing it is less than clear that one can own a tablet, especially an Apple one – serve? As is so often the case with modern society and corporations, terminology is inverted. Vendors used to offer service; now they claim that to assure they are serviced with cash flow. Modern licensing and contracts are one form of the current slavery. And that neither political party in the Yankee republic will even acknowledge it is an indication they are as much slaves of corporations as the citizenry.
Next, via NASA through the Scientific American, [Link] indications that we may not be able to blame soccer moms (and their mommy vans) for global climate change. It seems that the cause may track back to the end of the last cold phase when we humans began to seriously experiment with sedentaryism. And, of course, agriculture, which was necessary when we killed off all the animals for a day or so walk around.
I cannot help but be reminded of that quote of the first Lord Wellington, “if there is something of which I know nothing, it is agriculture.” Not necessarily believable given the period and his profession, but it seems that we are again presented with some new information about an old subject. And we shall get to observe how wildly the politicians deny that farming is part of the reason the species may be doomed.
On a more enjoyable branch, the same disreputable rag offers us a guest blog [Link] speculating on the role of beer in that sedentary process. Sitting still started so we could have more possessions, stuff, Burnes’ ‘gear’, and that leads us down a path where beer could occur accidentally and then drive us to the cultivation of wheat. Not completely digestible but definitely palatable. The story, that is. Regretfully, it is still a bit early for me to do beer. Never has been one of my morning libations.
And lastly, a lovely article on why the Gnome folks have wondered off into some sort of la-la land and have ceased to pay attention to what users want? Is this some sort of corporate greed or merely artistic fascism? It is often hard to tell, especially in our modern world. The good news is that it is recognized and numerous contrarian efforts are under way. But it seems strange that we can unify over how out GUIs work and not over our own freedoms?
The heat is back, for a few days at least, and while I generally prefer winter to summer – yes, why do I live in Alibam? – I generally do not like too much winter. Especially when I want to do something outside, such as traveling. This has always struck me as one of the primary differences between the old Confederacy and the rest of the Yankee republic. Southrons have a bit of a bunker mentality. They tend to hunker down and hide in the winter where their Nawthern – actual Yankee – cousins get out and experience the solidity of dihydrogen oxide. And since the invention of air conditioning, the summer bunker mentality has deepened as well although sometimes I wonder if the outside thing grew out of a search for wind, or breeze, at least. The Nawthern cousins on the other hand, have the same kind of summer bunker mentality, at least during the droop of the day, unless they live far enough Nawth that the day never droops but just gets to shirt sleeve levels.
One of my colleagues, Total Angular Momentum Magnetic Inductance, pointed out an article [Link] to me on the physics of writing. The article is a prepublication thing and sadly is poorly researched. It claims this is the first work done on the physics of writing, or more specifically, how pen, ink, and paper interact to permit writing. The simple fact is that the research on this goes back many years but since the Renaissance, has not been considered cutting edge enough for first rank journal publication. But in my years I have seen several articles on aspects of the subject.
This is not to say that the article is unwanted or unwelcome. To the extent that we can assess, based on trust compromised journalism, it will be worth a read when it gets published. Notably, and indicative of the poverty of excellence of journalism, the date of publication is unmentioned.
I have to admit, and compromise my colleague’s privacy, that both of us are students of pen-ink-paper coupling. For us, the mundane near afunctionality of ball point pens is a venue for telephone notes or checking off items on a grocery list. That list itself is written on good paper, with good ink, using a good fountain pen. And that is the butt plate of the spear. But articles such as this promises are welcome and valuable because as much as we may want to be scientific about this, we are faced with the constraints of doing no better than consumer social science, if those modifiers do not compromise the basis. The problem is that one cannot actually build one’s own pen, paper, ink. One may approximate building one of these with sufficient dedication, but regardless one is left with more a matter of finding the best combination from available commercial products adjusted by individual writing capabilities. Simply put, the latter means that some people have better ‘hands’ than others. Much as with piano players, some people can write beautifully with a BIC on a first grade pad while others can only scrawl on hand laid semi-parchment with the best pigment ink from a masterpiece of the fountain pen art.
My personal penmanship is further compromised by about half of my writing being equations, prompting my usual complaint that equations are something that can be written better and fast they they can be keyed.
Speaking of availability, I note [Link] that the Amazing Kindle Fire is outselling every tablet except the iPud. This prompts the question of what it is about tablets that prompts humans to want to be slaves? Yes, the educated can free themselves, as they always tend to have, but the bog cannot, and the marketplace seems to be degenerating into a question of who do you want for master: Apple or Amazing? I have to admit to feeling rather Vermontish about this, when I am not wondering just what makes the tablet so wonderful? One of my colleagues Spin-Total Angular Momentum reports that the KF is a good piece of work but we soon come to the hypothesis that whatever it is that makes a tablet addictive cannot be communicated. Living the the meth county of Alibam seems striking macabre at such instants.
On a more substantive note, [Link] boffins from U Birmingham have unearthed artifacts indicating the human departure from Africa occurred 100 KYA instead of the 70 KYA previous thought based on genetic analysis. This immediately raises questions having to do with miscegentaion incidence and just how smart can homo sapiens really be, especially in social organizations?
Nice day so far. I do tire a bit of this oscillation between what I think of as ‘cool’ and ‘warm’, realizing that such is completely subjective and a hold over of childhood susceptibility to bog programming. Falls into the same category as holding doors open for humans of the female persuasion which I rationalize as mommy programming to alleviate my guilt over sexism. This is one of the true curses of being old when you are stuck in the habits of mores past that have become anathema in mores present.
One of my Colleagues, Magnetic Inductance Force, and I were discussing the behavior wonkies of Nawth Alibam/Southron bogs and we came up with a epiphanal hypothesis that the primary religion of the old confederacy is football christianism. Film at 11.
Tuesday being science podcast day I listened to the latest episode of the SCIENCE podcast, among others, and was thrilled with an excruciating error on the part of the hired mediaist doing the podcast. It speaks volumes that actual knowledgeable nerds are not called upon for the podcast except the actual researchers being interviewed and that an error of this magnitude could be perpetrated. Shows how degenerate SCIENCE has become, why this is more akin to something coming from Scientific American. The hideous error? The journalist referred to the "Clovis civilization"! Embarrassment all around! Are these the lost cities of gold as well?
The egregiousness is that the Clovis folk, heretofore thought by archaeologists to have been the first folk in the Americas, had a culture and one or more societies, but no civilization. No cities, no civilization. To use the venerable words of Andy Griffith, ‘she done stepped in something", that something being a science cow flop.
The matter being discussed, [Link] also covered in this article, [Link] was the validation of a projectile point in the remains of a mammoth isotope dated to almost a kiloyear prior to Clovis. In fact, the PP was itself made of mammoth bone, indicating some sort of recursion, although not the type of idea used by anthropologists or easily explainable to mediaists.
Lastly, I found an article in the Economist, [Link] which makes it at least as suspect as one of those gossip newspapers sold at grocery store queue stations about the denial of climate change. Apparently a large part of the effort is to impeach data taken prior to any living observer. Thomas Boyle would certainly understand this argument but I rather doubt he would accredit it. Despite this, and some analytical legerdemain, it appears that the magnitude of the thermal trend is not impeachable, which would indicate that the citizens of Texas should consider as a fitting fate for their current chief executive on ground of gross irreality and bottomless (?) stupidity.
Let us get past the cause and figure out how to do something about the effect before we start killing each other over food and living space.
