I am not Georgia O'Keefe

He stumbled and fell down, screaming: I'm not Georgia O'Keefe! 

Note these are the result of or, at least, motivated by psilocybin. This is at Quisset. I could not tell if they were mergansers, scaup, or something else. [They were probably GoldenEyes.]

American Archeology - Older than you Think

So look, I have been examining man-altered rocks, here in Massachusetts, for a long time and certain things are clear to me, though I don't expect to be believable by anyone else. But like it or not, I make observations that I have to put into some kind of systematic logical framework. In the end I am developing a pretty peculiar view of American Archeology.

One example is stone tool shapes that have been worn and weathered down to something much subtler and almost invisible, unless you already know those shapes. I see things that might have gone through the glacier and come out the other side without entirely loosing their shape. Or maybe these items are weathered from a very long period of time, after the glacier left the landscape but when rivers and floods, and gravel, and boulder deposits still were changing the shape of the land, tossing things around in active rivers and shorelines, and when maybe some things were getting buried pretty deep underground - with all these things it suggests a prehistory of Massachusetts that extends back at least 20K years and, perhaps reaches back to a previous glacial period.

If Neaderthals made Mousterian tools, then I am only too happy to speculate about who could have made a Levallois blade I found - apparently from deep underground at my house in Woods Hole. Only too happy. But whether I want be happy about it or not, the item exists. So explain it to me? And indeed all those worn out, weathered, crude tools - explain them to me while you're at it. And until you do, I am going to have to imagine thick browed mariners, exploring a tundra country side and hunting mastodons out where today we go clamming.

Row your skiff, sonny

The Ram Island River runs north and south

from the safety of the harbor

to the wild, wild, waters of the

Woods Hole Passage

[Chorus:]

Row, Row, your
Skiff..., Skiff,
Sonny
Row, your
Skiff, Skiff,
Sonny
[repeat]

When you're out in the Hole

You better stay to the side

Or the ferry's wake will swamp you

And the standing wave will dump you

On the incoming tide

[CHORUS]

When the wind blows towards the yacht club

And the waves no longer foam

You can take you time clamming

You're just one oar-stroke from home

[Added lines, with slow rhythm:]

Long long ago,

Long long ago

[Resume verse:]

When the ice was up on Boston

and the sea was far away

There were prairie grasses growing

And a might river flowing

Out in Buzzard's Bay

They were hunting woolly mammoths

Where we catch stripers today

[CHORUS]

Biden's gaffe and the linguistics of value

One of the basic aspects of value is the way it transfers, within narrative assumptions, from one aspect of something to another. It could be from one part to another part: "his son was smart but his daughter...". Or it could be from one trait to another: "his skin was wrinkled but his blue eyes still twinkled with wit.". The transfer of value is called "Truism 4 C" and named after my wife Barbara who said: "If you like people you tend to see them as more good looking".

So recently Joe Biden said:

Poor kids are just as smart as white kids.

This is a great example for a couple reasons. Firstly it makes clear that to be poor is BAD. Also it transfers value from economic status to race, with whites being the race that is GOOD. It is inescapable that, in Joe Biden's narrative universe, to be Black is BAD. And that financial status and intelligence are of the same dimension, such that equating them does not stress the conversational assumptions. All of which is direct evidence that Joe Biden is operating with a number of depraved and in-appropriate mental categories:

[White, rich, smart, GOOD] [Black, poor, dumb, BAD].

You would think he would know enough to keep this to himself. So I guess I will speak "Joe Biden" for a moment and say: Joe is rich, stupid, and white.

Value rather than Truth, as a conserved quantity in language analysis

Many phrases have a subjective 'good' or 'bad' attribute. It is subjective whether a person, hearing a sentence, feels it as 'good', 'bad', or 'neutral' but it is usually a value that is shared by the person's culture. So saying: "we defeated the Russian troops" might be 'good' for an American, it might be 'bad' for a Russian. Also you can usually imagine examples where a surface neutrality is changed by adding some context. So "the tomatoes are red" might be neutral except in a discussion of their ripeness.

I was telling some friends, the Cole family of Shallow Pond Rd, about this idea of value being in the universal soup where the phrases live and the Tim asked about the sender/receiver relationship within communication and how value worked there. I hadn't thought about it but you can imagine having problems communicating with people who are assigning different values to the phrases exchanged.

So I have been thinking more about value and its properties as a quantity preserved or lost when combining phrases. The Greeks and later British were darned clever to come up with a True/False quantity that was always present in a proposition and it was preserved and modified by rules for combining and operating on proposition. Tracking that quantity almost made you feel like you are doing something useful! Anyway, the rules became Bool's laws and those, in turn, became the basis of computer architecture. But I believe value has its own rules. For example
  
a and b

           G B N
     G   G N G
     B   N B B
     N   G B N

a but b
          G B N
     G   N B N
     B   G N N
     N   N N N
   
a although b
          G B N
   G    N G N
   B    B N N
   N    N N N

These don't work too well because there are a variety of un-semantic constructs. No one says "but" between two good things. It would be considered incoherent. Also it would be incoherent to say "but" before something neutral. There is another aspect of the incoherence where the 'a' and 'b' of the proposition are not on the same channel of value. "We won the battle of Stalingrad but the jasmine bloomed later than usual that year". You would need to combine two very different conversational contexts to make this sentence seem rational. So trying to have a rule based analysis just won't work for good/bad.

So another thing I was talking about with the Cole's was that the Greeks and British avoided subjectivity it choosing to analyze Truth. This pinned them against a wall of trying to explain communication, without people being involved. I would have been pretty easy to explicate 'Truth' by reference to how people's belief is modified.

But anyway, it becomes clearer that conversational context and the subjective response to a proposition must themselves be the subject to an algebraic treatment. If you want to be algebraic, maybe it is about operations on conversational contexts. Hmm...

Star wars watching cuttlefish

Really? In 3D?

[This is a joke. I stole the picture from an MBL researcher studying binocular depth perception of cuttlefish.]