Born to party...

... known to nap.

Is spatial containment really a transitive relation?

I think containment within containment is a mathematical abstraction. For example: 

"The water is contained in the bottle and the bottle is in the room. Therefore the water is in the room."

You want to comment that for the water to be "in" the room could mean one of several things - in the bottle, as a spray in the air, as a puddle on the floor, etc. In each case you have to stop and think: yeah that is "in" the room. Because "in" is an abstraction covering these kinds of diversity.

Update: But even without appeals to general properties of being "in", language does not support the transitivity of water in a bottle also being in a room. The bottle is in the room, Period. Everything else is a technicality not an intuition. To think of the water as being "in" the room requires removing the bottle.  

Update: I am going to keep worrying at this. I think containment is a natural intuition but "in" is an abstraction that is defined to include contained containment. You say the water is contained in the bottle but you do not say the water is contained in the room. So really, since you can define "in" as a sequence of containments, what is wrong with that?

A bovine faun

 Part-way along.

Chatelperronian you say? That's a relief

So we saw that bladelet from Nevada compared to the Neanderthal one from La Ferrassie in France:

 

It bothered me that La Ferrassie was called "Mousterian" and that that meant a deep age. I was not too comfortable thinking the place in Nevada had material from 200K years ago. BUT, I went to look more carefully at the website where I found the picture La Ferrassie - Neanderthal rock shelter. The bladelet on the right comes from what they call the Chatelperronian layer - which typically dates to 45K to 40K years ago. That makes much more sense. People travelling up the Colorado River 40K years ago fits well. I suppose those Neanderthals did not survive.

Update: Too bad there are no Neanderthal skeletons in the US. Oh wait....there are. And plenty of their genes too!

A comment on adjective order

The information should be the same whether adjectives are given in the "correct" order or not. So, in principle ((X_/A)_/B) should be the same, if A and B are reversed.

Off hand, the reversibility of the order is theoretical. Getting it wrong is so awkward it suggests (sticking with the letter choices) that B sets an attribute of X_/A which was not available in X alone; and that A has no such attribute to set in X_/B.

A little logical rule

This is kind of interesting:

If you say A :: H_/q, then we can summarize by saying H::H_/q, forgetting how it happened. 

Whenever there are two ways of getting to the same answer, there is the possibility of math.

Revisiting a little hill in the Nevada Desert

 

Wrestling with the bedcover

And imagining it is a squid cuz you took mushrooms:

Judging age by degree of weathering - NE vs SW

Here in New England, the more weathered something is the older it is judged to be. It occurs to me that in an environment like dried glacial lakeshore in Nevada this principle could be wrong. Suppose older stone tools were buried and protected under sedimentation. Then desiccation would gradually expose materials with the younger ones exposed to weathering longer.

In accord with this, desert varnish would build up in reverse chronological order for places that were buried. It is a cautionary tale!

Narrative Stickiness

Sometimes I watch a single snowflake falling through the sky and, for the moment I am tracking it, it seems to have its own life and a story line that I am unwilling to abandon as the snowflake disappears into the rest of the snow. I feel a faint sadness as I turn towards other things and other activities. I think the reason for this is that energy was spent creating a topic instance for the snowflake and this instance gets orphaned quickly and our "system" is not set up to do that and wants to conserve energy.

Pineapple still life

I don't like staged still-lifes. But naturally occurring ones are okay. My eye was captured by the geometric regularity of the light and shadow on the pineapple leaves - of course I lost that completely. But the colors are nice.

Every story tells a picture

Recall the example of Sphinxmoth: "Liquid, out of my body".

Let's think of the words as glue that holds together some objects and action. When those words were in my head, so also was a picture:

Now I tend to think of the words being in one-one correspondence with parts of this picture but I am not at all sure this is correct. It may be a subtler meaning combinations which selects for individual parts of the picture. For example something in my body and something liquid (in my body) may combine to create a spherical vesicle picture, and that part of the picture is combined with others. The tube has openings to left and right. The sphere has no openings. Etc... 

One part of this idea is the "cloud" of other topics and ideas hovering around each word. The pictures and movements and directions are there anyway. The words trail a path through the cloud that can be enacted...

A man sniffs a bag of coffee

Waiting in line at Dunkin Donuts, they were under-staffed, and the guy in front of me reached over to a display rack, took a bag of their coffee grounds, sniffed it, and put it back. I knew what he was doing, he was evaluating the smell. 

As I passed from observing to understanding, what went through my mind was the feeling of myself reaching out to take the coffee bag and smell it. So (a) it feels like the ideas themselves are encoded in the muscle memory [a known concept]; and (b) it is the original imitation which forms the basis for memory and later ideas. Thus, imitation becomes a pillar of learning and a pillar of post-learning recognition.

You know...

Information flow from present to past and past to present

In my framework, the story moves forward and topics move along curves in what is called a "ledger". Examining it from the outside, you can pause anywhere you like in the chronology of the ledger and talk about information flow forward and backward at that point. 

I tell the story: I drove to town, went shopping, and was going to the hardware store when my car engine started acting up on me.

Here, the fact that you are driving makes the car an implicit topic. So you can bring it up as a non-sequitur. When the car starts having engine problems, that back-fills into the ledger via some kind of link. 

Suppose I continue with the story: I went to the garage but I spent too much money shopping and could not afford repairs.

Here, the fact that I went shopping from the past forward-fills a need for money - again by some kind of link.

I do not have vocabulary for the "links".

Having some trouble with the keyboard

  V and B are next to each other:

What would make a good arrowhead display?

A good display would first and foremost, have good lighting and no "back of shelf" awkwardness. Overall the goal of an exhibit is: to create a lasting memory of what is displayed. As for arrowheads, you can start by lining them up vertically, point upward. 

To me there are a number of interesting dimension but it can be simplified into the material information about an arrowhead and the aesthetic information. So the 'material' info is the age, location, material and the known and speculated context for the people who made the arrowheads - where they travelled.  

The aesthetic info is the dimensions of style and how variations are coordinated with the material info. But the aesthetic info can also highlight the finders of the arrowheads - their moments of delight and insight. The whole story of going to the Borden Colony in Raynham several times over a year and finding two wonderful arrowheads on a small patch of exposed dirt. How it felt to pick that last one up while making a video: Raynham Arrowhead.

So one arrangement would be a row of variations in one or another style of arrowhead. EG show the full range of "triangles". Or show Clovis points from around the area. Or do a good job with stemmed points.

In some other arrangement, put all the arrowheads (and other items) from a single site. Do what you can to explain site topography. Do what you can to tell the story of why people lived there and how was the site found.

Topping for fishcakes

I like to put tartar sauce and tomato and lettuce on my fishcakes and crabcakes. I had plenty of tomatoes but I was out of lettuce. So I substituted pea sprouts. Used some sour cream in the tartar sauce: mayo + relish + sour cream. 

Pea sprouts plus sour cream may be the magic extras. Not sure but it was very good.

Some recent color pencil drawings

 Goldenrod:

Gora:

A day in the life: doing my "barnacles" of linguistic research

Just to give you a feel for something: I have this list of narrative elements which, some time ago, I thought was complete. In the last 2 months I have had to struggle with new ideas until succumbing to the necessity of adding one, and then another, new elements. The dependency '-|' and the isPartOf '.' both are forced on me because they modify the ledger in unique ways not available to other narrative elements. 

So then I am tootling along and come to examples of 'isKindOf' that seem compelling ("Peanuts are a kind of legume") which are not affecting any ledger or Thesaurus involving the 'peanut' topic. So what do they mean? I was being forced to add yet one more narrative element and it made me unhappy. Is it possible I was on a slippery slope, where over time one after another new narrative element would appear - making the subject forever incomplete?

Then it dawned on me that we already have the topic of temp_collection. In introducing it, I comment that it still lacks means for reviewing elements or testing element-hood. Well.... 'isKindOf' provides one such testing method, without a review method. In fact, its use does modify a ledger, but it is a ledger built with a Thesaurus of temp_collection related topics. Not typically the same as a ledger about 'peanuts'.

In any case, since it is already a kind of 'topic', the 'isKindOf' does not need representation as an "element". Phew! Dodged a bullet. This last six months or so, working on The Moving Topic, has given me one puzzle after another. The meaning of 'causality' was a puzzle, the difference between 'dependency' and 'deficiency', and now the rescuing of 'isKindOf'. Each of these puzzles has begun as a test and ended as a solidification of the structure. It is reassuringly robust and I had a good day going up one more step.

Transitive or not?

Here is a good one:

If I believe everything that Bob says and Bob believes everything Sally says, then I should believe everything Sally says....except Bob might not repeat something Sally says. I cannot really be said to believe something that has not yet been said.

This is an example of information moving around that seems to lie near the heart of transitivity. Compare with: If I know everything Bob knows, and Bob knows everything that Sally knows; then I know everything Sally knows. 

Next installment on mathematical implication

I will continue puzzling over the meaning of "if...then..." in mathematics. Currently I think there is the 2 question: Why certain relations are transitive and: How mathematical implication is an invented umbrella term. Arguable this invention is at the heart of mathematical statements.

Let's talk about the latter. What "A implies B" (or "if A then B") means is that we can describe steps that take us from A to B, each of which is its own little "if...then". By saying "A implies B" we brush all those sub-steps together and ignore the details deliberately.  

Here is a simple example: "If you count from 1 to 10 then you pass 5". To clarify this statement, you refer to counting and (perhaps even counting from 1 to 10 to demonstrate) show that passing 5 is inherent in the definition of counting from 1 to 10. The "truth" of the statement relies on physical intuitions that have become abstracted. The childhood intuitions of counting and putting things in boxes is very important for many of these little steps. As a result there are all kinds of real world intuitions that start as empirical and become abstracted. 

On the other hand, there are relations that are transitive by definition, like 'isKindOf'; and possibly 'isPartOf'. These definitions can often be restated as implications.  By the time we have enough word definitions, the intuitions that gave rise to them are no longer obvious, but the definitions contain the needed necessities. 

Update: I finally decided that "A implies B" is just mathematical shorthand for either a definition or a more complex: "I can prove it" - which could be quite involved, including definitions as well as intuitions developed from games, and who knows what else. For example: "if you count from 1 to 10 then you will pass 5".

A poem from my friend Dave Larson

My moment in the semi conductor spotlight and the semantics of "cooking rice"

I had a Chinese colleague who taught me an expression that was supposed to be the Chinese version of "Garbage In - Garbage Out". It was "Even a savvy housewife cannot cook a meal without rice". I used this expression when I stood before the entire engineering department at UMC (the #2 semiconductor manufacturer in Taiwan) and bet my life about my ID-ing which of there process machines was malfunctioning. I started my presentation using the Chinese expression. I hope I got it close to right! It was actually a big moment in my life. Anyway, the Chinese phrase stuck with me, although I doubt I can say it correctly anymore: Chow foo, nung wei, woo me, che sway. 

Recently I was confronting the need to understand 'dependency' and add it to my narrative elements. The example I had in mind was the dependency of a meal on having rice. After some thought I could see that the meal would have a plan, or recipe, that included a step of making rice - which converts uncooked rice to cooked rice. A simpler dependency is: "You cannot cook rice without rice". Sounds sort of dumb but there it is. 

I speculate that all dependencies are of the form of an event with a sub-event whose target that must be present. Anyway, playing around with the semantics of rice: Don't lie to me about rice.

Transitive relations

I am puzzled by this. I do not see whether transitivity is a linguistic concept or not. In math they say a relation 'R' is transitive when xRy and yRz imply xRz. But that is bit circular because the definition of "imply" papers over the same details one wants to understand. Giving a common name to different (seeming) details is not a substitute for understanding what, if anything, they have in common. 

Some types of transitive relation:

1. Containment
2. Dependency
3. Becoming
4. Any kind of ordering

These are not just "manner of speaking" different. Do they share something? Is it linguistic? 

It does not seem mathematically sound to pretend they are the same, without understanding why. Also one can see a possible fallacy, where an argument shifts from 'containment' to 'dependency' or 'transformation'; having proved something for one but not for the other.

Update: Maybe (1) is an example of (2).

Update: Suppose reaching y from x along a directed path defines xRy. A hypothesis is that 'R' is transitive iff all other paths from x to y are homotopic to this one.

Update: I did not say it clearly: 'imply' is a transitive relation, so using it to define transitive relation is circular.

Two word obnoxious-ness

Sorry. Thanks!

Un hun. What?

I know...right?

Approaches to studying rock piles

I am posting this here because I am slightly critical of people I consider my friends and allies. But I don't agree with them.

I see three trends. 

• The Manitou - archaeo astronomy approach.
• The Rock Piles - observational descriptive and statistical approach
• The Waking Up on Turtle Island - projecting shapes approach

I see the Manitou approach as being difficult to practice and most of the people who make casual "alignment" claims are not doing the heavy lifting of surveying correctly. It is an approach limited to people with training. 

I see the Rock Piles approach as natural: you do a lot of looking and comparing, before you theorize about the function and topography. You let statistical realities determine categories.

The Waking Up... approach is to see turtle and snake shapes in rocks. My friend Tim MacSweeney has gotten more and more extreme about this - most recently looking at a stack of 5 rocks and insisting that it was snake heads on top of snake heads. 

As far as I can tell, the Native Americans are using ideas that combine Manitou and Waking Up. But they are, I believe, informed by the Rock Piles approach.

Update: I observe that the "Waking up" approach dominates popular discussions. Here is why it sort-of is a sad thing: There are numerous YouTube videos where the author is totally pre-occupied with spotting turtle shapes in the stone wall. They pay zero attention to things like topography or site layout. Their attention is captured, consumed even, with a visual recognition task  -spotting reptiles - that has almost no intellectual depth. For them, the stonework is an opportunity to exercise their perceptions. Same for me, but it is a different set of perceptions and ideas. I find their approach shallow. It tells nothing about people or distributions of style across the countryside or time. It gives no insight into the past. Funny thing is, I never really heard anyone explain what it means to look like a turtle. Its significance is not communicated by folks who most want to practice this methodology.

Pan fried noodles with tofu block

This is a bit difficult because you have to cook four components and combine them, so logistics is complicated. They are: fried vegetables + al dente cooked spaghetti + scrambled egg + tofu.

One method is to scramble the egg before hand and set aside. Fry the tofu and keep it warm in the oven. Boil the noodles and keep ready. Fry the vegetables, add the noodles, add the egg, serve with the tofu.

You will need soy sauce and oyster sauce. This recipes is for 2 or 3 servings. Cook enough noodles for that, or scale the quantities. It is supposed to be mostly noodles.

To cook the eggs: mix a small amount of corn starch slurry into two eggs. Wisk. Pan fry in a large table spoon of oil. Use salt and pepper.

To cook tofu: take a block of tofu and slice it through the midline of the shortest dimension - so you have two large blocks, each 1/2 a block thick. 

Try to dry these out a bit with a towel but do not press hard. Leave the tofu alone. Dust each piece thoroughly with corn starch. Fry in a shallow layer of oil: slowly, to drive off the moisture, one side at a time, and until it is crispy and golden brown/burnt on each surface. Remove to a plate and keep warm in the oven. No seasoning at this stage.

To cook noodles: try not to overcook, as the noodles will be cooked slightly more later. Drain and set aside.

To cook vegetables: Take small amount of all vegetables (<1/4 cup, finely chopped of each): onions, carrots, green onions, mushrooms, cabbage. Fry onions, add a teaspoon of chopped ginger. When onions are started, add carrots, then mushrooms and green onion (white part). When all else is softened, add cabbage and wait for it to wilt. Now add scrambled eggs and 1 Tsp soy sauce, 1 Tbs of oyster sauce (really key!). Stir in cooked noodles. Top with green onion (green part). Put on serving dish but keep frying pan hot. 

Put tofu back in hot frying pan for 45 sec while you pour a small amount of soy sauce over the two pieces. Serve over/beside the noodles.

2+2=4

Saw an article talking about how we do not know why 2+2=4. Seems pretty simple to me. It has to do with representing counting and translation along a fixed ruler, with the observation that counting '2' from a starting point, and '2' from the new starting point - take you to a place on the ruler that is aka '4'.

If what you are missing in this account is an underlying ontology, seek no further than topic structures (dude!). The point is not that the two ledgers are identical ('2+2' is not the same as a direct '4') but the final state of the ledger is the same. In this version, we consider '1' to be a type with multiple instances. 

There should be nothing surprising or deep about having a single name for a place ("4") and having different ways of getting there: direct counting versus repeated counting. Maybe it is a bit magical that we can do the counting in our head and always get the same results. On the other hand it looks like I am saying '2+2=4' is an empirical statement.

The sleight of collection

An idea from graduate school that I was quite proud of was based on observing different kinds of "1". There is the counted number '1'. There is the ordered 'first'. There is the distance from the zero to one along the real number line. I liked the idea of using the same name for a collection as for the last element of the collection. Thus '{1,2,3}' is identified with '3'. I called this the "sleight of collection" because it is like a sleight of hand whereby some underlying dynamics get captured in the naming of things.

Ashtray

 

My life in a still life

I call the notation my "jalopy". I told Barb I was hoping it would become a spaceship. Also arrowheads and you-know-what in the Altoids box. The hint of pills is correct too. I have an ear infection.

Free speech dies in a "secure" world

From "Cointelgraph" AI researchers say they've found a way to jailbreak Bard and ChatGPT.

Here is the money line: 

The research also highlighted increasing concern that AI chatbots could flood the internet with dangerous content and misinformation.

This is stated quite blithely. Sadly, "content" is essentially the same thing as "speech". This is "big brother is watching you" rearing its ugly head. Why is it that Americans brag to themselves about their freedoms without any grasp of what those freedoms mean?

More clearly: Content is not dangerous. Speech is not violence. Those who wish to restrict your access are called censors and they are never on the side of basic American values.

Computer eloquence is not a priority (for me)

Who cares how eloquent a computer is when all that matters is that its information is useful?

Speech without comprehension

Where can I be snide if not my own blog? So, the AI rage these days is about the wonderful language mimicry of ChatGPT and OpenAI. What a deep understanding of sentence structure provides, brought to you by the likes of Chomsky and other dolts north of the Charles, is that now computers can produce fine sentences and paragraphs with no understanding; except that the form of the question determines the form of the answer - with tidbits of internet-scraped content inserted in the appropriate blank spaces in the sentence structure.

Beautifully articulated prose with no understanding is what you get from Chomsky himself. Imagine believing that the transistor explains the software written on a computer! Or that internet protocols are all that is needed to understand internet content! Or that the meaning of "red" could somehow be embedded in grammar and syntax. Anyway, Chomsky's stupidity is now leveraged on the world and engineers are frantically trying to figure out how "large language models" are supposed to do things like order a pizza. They cannot. 

But the old "assistants" like Siri and Alexa work fine using keywords. Software assistants use keywords. My approach has always been to do better keyword matching, to include narrative pattern matching. 

Anyway, something genuinely ironic is beginning to emerge in the latest ChatGPT developments. They are starting to market "structured commands" as a kind of input template "to save the user having to re-type the same things over and over". I think that is not really what is going on. It seems obvious that the attempts to make ChatGPT work are going to be introducing keywords. Some poor bloke thinks all they need to do is structure the command, let ChatGPT do something with that input, then write a program that acts on the basis of what ChatGPT produces as output. The irony is that: it will not take them long before realizing that ChatGPT did not add and value and can be eliminated as an unnecessary intermediary between structured commands and structured output. 

In the end, Chomsky's work will have the lasting value of making computers seem literate. But for language understanding, there has been no progress from that direction. 

I am proud I went to BU: My university was south of the Charles River. We were phenomenologist in Boston, while they were logical positivists in Cambridge. It explains why they are still trying to write programs to discover reality over there.  

Barbara Waksman in 2010

Continuing the posting of nice pictures of Barb. We don't have too many from when she was in hygiene school:

Personal goals for guitar playing

It takes a level of skill to play the guitar with grace. It takes a another level to play with athleticism. In the end (and in private) you want to be able to play with abandon.

Knapping ideas - mental arrowheads

Very conscious of getting decrepit, I am frantically trying to finish certain works on paper to leave behind as my "arrowheads". Hopefully someone will look carefully along "the beach", and find what I wrote.

Not a sphinxmoth

But it ought to be:

Fixing the narrative pattern <--> topic correspondence

What needs to get fixed is my thinking about it. Sadly, every narrative pattern needs to correspond with a unique topic, and I must deal with equivalence of narrative and of topic. 

E.g. now I must think of (X) as indicating a sub-narrative on one hand, and topic part of another topic on the other hand. Sadly, I now have to figure out why a sub-topic is equivalent to its container, when the containing "parent" adds no additional parts or attributes, beyond X. Or I have to live with them being different.

Update: This is WRONG. Narratives are too complicated to be topics structures. And ((X)) cannot be another topics from X. Trying to set up topic "equivalence" is a nightmare. Also, the whole point of the ledger is to handle multiple topics. X,Y,Z, .... cannot be a topic, it is a narrative that becomes a ledger. It is like this: a sequence of points is not a point and it is a mistake to think in that direction.

Mixing sentences with reality

Notice how you can be talking about your pipe and point to it, sitting on the table. You can mention buying it at the market and smoking from it for a year. Isn't it interesting that you can slide between abstract words and concrete visual perceptions (with pointing) in one sentence? It makes it seem that the sentence is right up close to the perception of reality.

Arrowhead with barnacles

 

From Barnstable - my first coastal "arrowhead". It is too thick to actually be an arrowhead but it is a classic shape. The barnacles lend an air of seashore.

I was thinking of the following, really dumb joke: It was lunchtime and I was driving around Barnstable looking for a sandwich. I might as well have been driving around Sandwich looking for a Barnstable.

This year's sketches of the hollyhocks

I keep trying. It is a matter of making a single impression.

'For All' and 'There Exist' are not elementary concepts

These infamous logical quantifiers are considered part of the foundations of mathematics. But they are not at all fundamental and (frankly) have no business there. They are based on collection review methods and on pattern matching, as follows. 

In the context of a collection, you need a mechanism for reviewing the elements of the collection. 

In case of "for all", you have a pattern and look for a pattern mismatch during the review. If you find one you stop early with failure.

In case of "there exists", you have a pattern and look for a pattern match during the review. If you find one you stop early with success.

In other words, the logical quantifiers are not as fundamental as: reviewing a collection, pattern matching, and stopping early with a result. Some patterns have "opposites" and pattern matching one is mismatching the other. Absent such symmetry, matching is different from mismatching. If people wanted to think about foundations, they would think about that.

Saw a strange coyote today

Thought I would mention it. It was oversized, slightly short-haired, and a bit brindle colored. Acted skittish too.

A palindrome for my wife

 Figured this one out on a long plane flight one time:

Arab rab(b)le to manipulate set al(l) up in a motel, Barbara.

The elements of dieting

I lost 40 lbs in 6 months. So now I am an authority. Here is what I suggest:

1. Find something to sublimate the urge to eat - smoke, chew gum, ...

2. Embrace feeling hungry. You will go to bed hungry and wake up hungry.

3. Make the meals count: find ways to make a really delicious meal for <300 calories.

Everything else is auxiliary. I ate only lunch and dinner with a little drink in the pm. I had a few treats, like yogurt with agave. Olive Oil. Walnuts. Prunes. Cod Liver Oil. It is expensive to lose weight and have good nutrition.

Dinghies and Skiff at Quisset Harbor

 

An unusual day in the place of Quartz Triangles

Here was a heartbreaker, but I expected it.

It was an unusual day. I was picking up bits of quartz with both hands and stuffing nice arrowheads in my pocket without even realizing. Depending on how damaged a specimen is to be counted as an "arrowhead" I found between 10 and 15. The larger items, in the bottom row of the middle picture above, are hatchets - I think. They were comfortable knapping quartz in triangles.

Rhododendrons at entrance to Devil's Lane, Woods Hole

The Moving Topic - The Thesaurus as analog of Euclidean Space

I find the idea increasingly compelling, that a properly constructed thesaurus supports some of the same geometric ideas as are applied to Euclidean and related spaces. Specifically the moving point in space is analogous to the topic moving in the thesaurus. The final curve that was traced by the point is analogous to the story information, told one word at a time. 

This analogy continues at the local level, where different narrative structures are "best fit" to the adjacent verbiage, and used to fill in topic specific information. This mechanism is analogous to the derivatives at a point on a curve corresponding to "best fit" idealized line, circle, helix. Thus the moving frame of Frenet, Darboux, Cartan, Chern, [Pohl], ... becomes a moving local narrative for transforming local words into defined topic structures. It may seem awkward but, in this formulation, the words are parameters of the moving topic.

To round out the theory (literally) I hope to state some basic principles about connectivity and completeness of stories [Also the negatives: non-sequitur and irrelevance]. Details are coming into view.

Script in Utah

I tell you, those great basin petroglyphs with shadowy figures looming in every picture: those are a writing system - you can tell from the way the pictures are embellished with bits of other symbols. 

There was one with a picture of a person's intestines. To the left a cactus, to the right a hornet. Seems like a good place to start trying to understand. It seems obvious that it is a medical instruction. 

Asparagus

 

Chert is NOT quartz

Recently in an arrowhead video comment, I chastised another commenter for confusing chalceonoy with quartz. According to Britannica quartz is - pretty much - anything containing SiO2. So he was right and I was wrong.

However, in consideration of the difference in knapping properties of -say- chalcedony and quartz, the first is a smooth conchoidal fracture material and the second is an un-predictable and brittle material - these two should in no way be considered the same thing. Because in arrowhead commenting society the knapping properties are significant. I do not think the community uses the word "quartz" the way Britannica does.

Math is really the study of Z^n and R^n

They have had two or more thousand years to work on the counting numbers and the real number spaces. Math has been and remains about the "stuff" of R^n, Z^n, and abstract sets.

R^n is a mathematical object that lies very close to how we think about the material universe. So our thinking about the "stuff" of the one is like thinking about the "stuff" of the other. Now I want to study a new kind of "stuff" and I am afraid it might take quite a few years to understand this. The stuff is the thesaurus, ledger, and narrative structures that define the moving topic in my theory.

"a dog" versus "the dog"

I thought I understood the difference between "a" and "the" as a difference in assumptions about the set the dog belongs to. I now have a better explanation in terms of my current ideas of topics, thesaurus's, and ledgers: 

When we begin a discussion we put a topic instance into a ledger. If we say "a dog" we are putting it into the ledger without a context. When we say "the dog" an empty context structure is created or assumed to be pre-existing.

Proposing an origin of the Pythagorean Theorem

My grandparents left me several Arabic/Persian inlay boxes: made from mosaics of many small wooden tiles; triangular, square, and other shapes. It occurred to me that if you were constructing one of these boxes and needed to fill in a larger triangular or square area, then it would not take you long to know how many small tiles it was going to take. Knowing that a^2 and b^2 added up to c^2 would be empirical knowledge for a box maker. Easy to re-discover.

Osprey Sketch

I have been working on it. This version is a "that's what I'm talking about":

Now I have to try and execute this as a scrimshaw:

The advantages of slow cooking meat

A basic cooking technique for meat (beef, poultry, pork) is to use a baking dish and

• A bed of carrots and onions (with other flavors added as desired; like garlic, parsley, apples)
• A foil cover, stretched tight
• Meat that has been rubbed with salt and pepper, possibly other spices
• Cook at below 300 F for a few hours, remove foil and keep cooking for another hour. Basting as desired.

So, this is a recommended way to cook brisket or pork tenderloin. When I do it with turkey thighs or chicken breasts I get extremely flavorful and tender meat. After about four hours, pork and beef pull apart easily. You might not want that. One variation is to leave off the foil from the start- you get a dry result. You might just want to roast and baste. But for flavor and tenderness, this covered method is the way to go. You get accumulated moisture in the pan, which makes a good gravy. 

Here is a recipe: Use chicken breasts with garlic, paprika, parsley, salt, and pepper. Make a gravy from the juice. Serve with mashed potatoes and peas. The house smells good the next day.

Eider Duck - finished ivory carving, stained with MX procion dye

Dyeing Ivory Material with Procion MX Dye

I found I could easily paint fingernail polish onto ivory, and remove it later with acetone. This allows you to mask out parts of an ivory surface, leaving other parts un-masked. Then you submerge the item in vinegar overnight. Rinse and soak overnight in procion dye. Next day, add salt. Next day, rinse and remove mask. Voila! A well-stained surface. 

Note, if you do not prep the surface with vinegar, the dye does not adhere as well. It still adheres a bit.

I am hoping to get a nice rich black on the underbelly of the eider duck carving. The test was done on a bit of whale tooth.

Spontaneous Still Life

Keeping my hand in.

Lithic Analysis of Nevada Stone Tools

I wanted to make a single video but the tools kept crashing. Finally found a nice free tool called "CapCut". Here is the video.

I have a number of meta comments:

Measurement Related

1. The measurement could be improved if we accepted a form of "type hysteresis" where a given flake near the boundary between flake Types is pushed into an adjacent Type by virtue of obviously being adjacent to other flakes of that adjacent Type. One slightly long 'Type 1' in the midst of 'Type 2' could be moved into Type 2 this way.

2. The measurement included an estimate of the proportion of the perimeter occupied by tertiary flakes.

3. We gave separate measurements for front and back - allowing mono- facial tools to stand out.

4. Acknowledge that smaller tools cannot have over sized flakes and mostly don't have core, so it is down to 2-ary, 3-ary, and edge work. Similarity to classification of larger tools becomes irrelevant.

Evolution Related

One notes examples of where a crude style is replaced by one with additional details that are 2 octaves below. For example the Oldowan chopper has cortex plus Type 2 flakes. But the Acheulean Axe has cortex plus Type 1 and Type 2 flake. Another example is the Middle Paleolithic flake giving way to the Aterian Point - going from Type 1 to Type 1 plus Type 3. Then the Aurignacian brings in the intermediate Type 2 flakes.

This phenomenon of new details appearing two octaves below previous level might have a mechanism something like this: small errors occur at that level before those errors become deliberate and then get enlarged into an intermediate size range. As per:

The core versus the flake

Early people must have been swinging rocks around and hitting other hard things. This would lead inevitably to a flake being nocked off the core. The rock user might have chosen to go on using the (now broken) rock and, in some cases might prefer it to the original. Not too hard to start removing the flake deliberately. But it is a small flake. Once you learn to remove small flakes deliberately, it is not hard to make larger "small" flakes deliberately because you have learned to think that way.

I want to suppose that, in a different scenario, someone found a use for the flake that got nocked off the core. This would then set up two evolutionary lines of stone tools: core tools and flake tools. Thus the Acheulian hand axe is post-Oldowan but so is the Mousterian flake - and not evolved from the hand axe.

Empanada Fillings

The next post explains a good dough. I have tried pork, chicken, and beef fillings for empanadas. On all of these, you add liquid to the heated mixture so that gravy is just about dripping out from the mixture. You can still wrap the mixture (when cooled) but they are juicy when bitten into.

The beef filling was never great but essentially: add taco seasoning and fried onions to ground beef. Fill dough with beef mixture and large chunks of hard-boiled egg.

The chicken filling was surprisingly good: add a bit of "saison" and "adobo" and paprika to fried onions [and a little garlic], green peppers, and previously cooked chicken. Add some grated cheese, and a little tomato paste. Heat together with chicken broth to achieve the desired moisture content. 

Had some leftover "carnitas" pork - spicy but dry. Chopped (pulled) pork apart, added to fried onion. Since pork was already spicy and garlicy, added small amount of tomato paste, some chopped carrots, peas, potatoes, and raisins. Used chicken broth to add moisture.

Summary: add hard boiled egg to beef; cheese to chicken; and raisins to pork.

Empanada Dough - In the Kitchen with Johnny

From (27) How to Make Empanadas from Scratch - Chicken Empanadas - Empanadas Dough Recipe - YouTube 

A good basic recipe.

For the empanada dough recipe: 2-1/4 cup all purpose flour 8 Tbsp cold butter, cut in small cubes 1 tsp salt 1 large egg 1 Tbsp white distilled vinegar 1/2 cup cold water (more or less )

Examining a piece of broken glass

 I was back at the Edwin S. Wilder Wildlife Management area in Raynham, in the same spot where I previously found a piece of deliberately flaked glass (see here) and found another bit of old broken glass that caught my attention. Thick, dark green, edged (deliberately?), and scratched on its front and back surface. Let's take a look:

These things have a sort of beauty. 

Note the two edges on either side of the tip. This one...

...looks like it was pressure flaked. 

And this one...

...looks like it was battered or damaged. 

Looking at the surface, one notices directional scratches. The curious thing is that the scratches on one surface are more or less perpendicular to the scratches on the opposite surface. 

Note the scratches are perpendicular to the axis running up to the tip. Turning the piece over:

These scratches are roughly aligned with the axis up through the tip, perpendicular to the ones on the opposite side. So, if used, both sides were used.

Update: This indicates that prehistoric technologies remained in use long after you would expect. The same could be said about rock piles. Finding little sharp blades makes one kind of sense: you might need a scalpel. But a scraper? That indicates continued hide preparation activities. I am wondering what kind of trapping or souvenir industries would have that need?

Eider Progress

Kind of Yin-Yang

Shrimp Egg Foo Yung

Prepare all the ingredients (but do not mix). This is the recipe for 3 patties:

For the omelet

 - 3 eggs

 - one cup of mung bean sprouts

 - a couple chopped green onions (and chop an extra one for topping the final servings)

 - a few small mushrooms, chopped

 - a 1/2 cup carrot shavings

 - 4 largish shrimp, chopped 

 - 1 tsp of corn starch

For the sauce

 - a tbs of soy sauce

 - 2 tbs of oyster sauce

 - a 1/2 tsp sugar

 - a few drops of sesame oil

 - a tbs of butter

 - two tbs of flour

 - 1.5 cups of chicken boullion

 - a little chopped onion

 - a little chopped garlic

 - a few tbs of cornstarch/water slurry (50/50)

Instructions:

We are going to mix the patties just before putting them in hot oil. Fry them for 4 minutes a side and remove to a warm oven. Then pour off extra (but not all) oil, lower the temp, add the butter, make a roux with the flour, add onion and garlic, cook for a minute or two, then add chicken broth, soy sauce, oyster sauce, sesame oil, sugar, and cook this gravy for a minute or two. Add enough broth that it is slightly liquidy, then thicken with a cornstarch/water slurry. When the gravey is ready, filter it through a seive and serve in a bowl. Serve the patties, with a few extra pieces of chopped green onion on top. 

If you beat the eggs thoroughly and add a little cornstarch, they get fluffy and crispy when fried. 

Snoozing Eider... in process

Turkey Hunting with an atlatl

Was just reading an article about BLM archeologists at a National Turkey Hunting day demonstrating the use of atlatls to hunt turkey. Someone commented "I would go hungry if I had to hunt turkeys that way".

My immediate thought was that it would probably be easier to hunt turkeys with a throwing stick, a bola, or something involving snares. So unless you find an arrowhead (or "dart point") with turkey blood on it, then I would give up on that idea. Why not kick that up a notch and demand a fossil turkey with an arrowhead lodged in its vertebrae!

A letter I wrote to a friend

I have formed the opinion that the way forward in America is not through elections but through labor organizations (or other unions) forcing the government to do the right thing. I have watched more than 50 years of failed political solutions and I am willing to believe we should try something else. Apparently one of the difficulties in forming unions is the difficulty in finding leadership. This seems particularly unfortunate as "power corrupts" and leaders, inevitably, tend to have power. The conclusion might be that leaders always become corrupt, so maybe they should be avoided. So I wrote my friend Johannes, who works in labor organizing at SEIU

I hope you are safe and well. 

I have been thinking about unionizing software and realized that the most fundamental issue is not about finding leadership but about getting people to feel solidarity with each other. I am guessing that barriers to unionizing are often seen as a matter of conflict between employer and worker. That is what all the newspaper stories are about. But I think the conflict between individual workers and creation of solidarity might be the most significant challenge. After all, you are asking people to put their jobs on the line when they strike. They won't do it out of self interest but they will do it out of solidarity.

On a related note: I think the goal of merging unions (like merging all transportation-related unions) is a crucial need in America. And I think the dynamic for this might be similar to  the dynamic for forming a union itself, with similar solidarity issues between unions, rather than individual people. On the other hand, there is no "employer" and it is all about creating solidarity and figuring out how to define an all-purpose employment contract - something that would need to include an understanding of the government's role.

These are some tough issues to think about.  

Update: I got a better idea. If unions should not need a leader, workers should not need a union. What they need is a good employment contract. This leads to the idea of a universal contract.

Exchange heard at the supermarket

 - "Living the life"

 - "One day at time"

What were the weirdest things you saw in the desert?

Well, finding a colonial root cellar was pretty strange.  

I did not take a picture but I was noticing a badger hole and then spotted a metal tag, glued to a nearby small rock. It said "1530" on it. I have no idea why someone would go around gluing metal tags to rocks but imagined it was some kind of badger tracking system.

Here is a story: I drove with my friend Dave Larson along a dirt road, under power lines and up to a pass between the hills. I thought it might be a way to spot game trails and somewhere to look for arrowheads. We parked at a turnaround that was covered with shell casings, shotgun shells, broken skeet, and broken glass. About twenty yards out we also saw Coke Cans that were still unbroken and I came across a Corona beer bottle that still had beer in it. I popped it open and enjoyed a wind cooled free beer in the middle of the Nevada desert. You had to wonder why, after missing their shots, they did not go collect the unbroken Coke and Coronas. They could have been distracted or just been too drunk.

[When I told this story to a barmaid at the airport, she started worrying it was going to be a scary story, as soon as I mentioned "middle of nowhere" and "gun". When I got to the end she supplied the phrase - "finding a beer in the middle of the Nevada desert". In fact, I was dehydrated and it was delicious.]

Oh yeah! That WAS a glacial lakeshore.

I am smacking myself in the forehead for not realizing I was exploring exactly the kind of glacial lakeshore early-man site that I wanted to find in Nevada. Better late than never.

On the other hand, I am patting myself heartily on the back for picking a place to explore that has perhaps the highest concentration of lithic debris in the whole valley. The dark brown crescent at the southern end of the chert outcrop is darker than any other of the patches. Having been there on foot, I can tell you what these different features are:

The amazing thing (I'll write about this more on Rock Piles) is that the darker patches are a heat map. I am now looking at aerials of the whole valley (called Hidden Valley on the topo map) and not only is my hill the best place to look (the darkest) I can also see other specific places I should have gone here and there - because they also have dark brown patches. How cool is that! 

Random thought from my trip to Nevada

Gosh there are so many different little thoughts from my trip to Nevada. Like this one I just had about the dark brown rock that is the commonest tool material on my little hill. I looked up "chert" and it is the perfect definition for this material, as far as I can tell. This is gratifying for several reasons. One is that I had almost figured out a material with nodules in some places and layers on other places, would have to be like an accreting flint but also -somehow- sedimentary. Well, what do you know, they suspect that diatomaceous layers were the source of SiO2 molecules which migrated around to form chert.

And I was trying to resolve the difference between white chalcedony [??] and brown chert. It is OK, they are compatible as different varieties of mixture between trigonal and monoclinic  forms of SiO2 crystal. Don't ask me what that means. 

But here is the little thought: I had decided that the brown chert and the white Chalcedony could not be the same material because the chert remains shiny when underground but the white material become crumbly like chalk. So you pull a fragment out of the ground and expect the white stuff to have deteriorated but the brown stuff to be like new (at least visually).

Cedar Swamp

 

I have tried many times to capture a little of the gloomy mood of the cedar swamp by Nobska Rd. This try is closer than most.

Getting rid of "search". How 'bout internet standardized directories?

Looking to eliminate search algorithms. "How ever am I supposed to find what I am looking for?"

One answer is to reject the idea of internet platforms picking winners and losers that do not show you what you want anyway. So how about standardized subject directories, where a content creator decides how to list links to their content. The trick would be to assign a "1" to each source of content, and divide that weight up - however the creator wishes - across the directories. You could put all weight into one sub-directory, or divide it up a bit here and a bit there. People trying to be listed everywhere would get less weight. The weights would determine list order within the sub-directory.

People who should know better did not notice how exact string matches stopped working in Google and the other search engines circa. 2014. That is when search started to suck. Now it it effectively a catalog designed to optimize shopping - with search weight determined by a platform pretending it is not a publisher or editor [hey Supreme Court: they obviously are, because they edit the 'table of contents'].

Today's search AI is garbage. Here is how I know: I am looking for fruit sock - bags to protect fruit, ripening on the tree. All I can find on Google is links to regular socks with pictures of fruit. Same when I try to find mathematics about language. All Google will show me is content about how mathematics is a language. I want an internet that understands prepositions! Too bad search engines cannot tell fruit pictures on socks, versus sock for fruit. But let's not ask for too much. 

Anyway, if a content creator decides to classify their content - then that sounds like a better system. Save the AI garbage for finding people whose content does not belong in that category - a policing activity that should be public, transparent, and using open source algorithms. In case of ambiguity, go with the opinion of the content creator. 

Would that work?

Signs of Spring - February 2023

First crocuses in the yard: Feb 11

First red-winged blackbird calls: Feb 20

[Added later] I want to say the first ospreys were around March 20.

Also, first swallows April 14. first hummingbird April 25; first goldfinch April 26

Quartz concave base point - Massapoag

Went with Barb to Ward's Berry Farm, an Audubon Society property in Sharon, and found a fine quartz point.

I did not see much and was going to give up on the place, when I saw this little quartz tip sticking out from the side of a rut. Now I know this place, with a rather vast array of fields, is a place worth spending quite a lot more time.

Update: Except, maybe not. I spent maybe more than 3 hours there a few days later and saw almost nary a flake of quartz. It is possible this was an isolated arrowhead? The water weathering on front and back are peculiar, since the edges are still sharp. 

That warm feeling...

...of knowing that you have things to watch until bedtime.

A pretty argillite arrowhead

From "coastal Rhode Island":

Browsing Buddy

An interesting product would allow one person to follow the browsing sequence of a different person. It would be fun, and weird.

Croissant with Poolish

[Dough from 1/2 the following recipe - about two cups of flour and a lot of air. Slightly over-proofed.]

Poolish is a pre-ferment that you are supposed to mix up the night before and put in fridge: a small tsp yeast +1 cup flour + 1 cup water. [Today, I am starting the poolish in the morning, using it later this afternoon or evening; and freezing the dough for overnight, later.][I admit, I am not sure how much yeast to use. I put a bit too much in my poolish, so I'll go light with the additional yeast later.]

Mix:

poolish + 1/2 tsp yeast + 4 Tbs oil + 1 tsp salt + 1/2 cup milk + 3 Tbs sugar +  ~3 cups flour

Then follow the instructions for continuous croissant. Given all the amendments, here is what I am going to try:

- Kneed thoroughly, until silken

- Rest at room temp until double in size, then punch down and

- Either freeze the dough for overnight or put in fridge while softening the butter.

- [If frozen, next day:Take out of freezer and bring to room temp, then back in fridge to fridge temp]

- Soften butter, take out cooled/not-frozen dough and do the butter envelope, with two turns. 

- Rest dough in fridge for 2 hours, then do two more turns, then rest 2 hours, then form croissant.

- Let them rise until "jiggly" (not quite double) on a parchment paper-covered baking pan.

- Coat with egg wash, bake at 420 for 18 plus minutes. 

I heard that Chia is re-opening

Not the pet, dummy! The country.

A comment on aethetics

One thinks of "The Beautiful" as some kind of absolute - perhaps involving ease of perception and such things built organically into our anatomy. [I used to think this was the basis of violet being more beautiful than red.] But the appreciation of beauty must have an important learned component. I remember well how my father would pause on a ridge in the White Mountains and exclaim with pleasure about the beauty of the view across the 'Great Gulf'. I am pretty sure those views were not appealing to me, as a youth. I think maybe we learn to enjoy sunsets.

So I found a badly waterworn 'blade' that I thought was quite beautiful, in a Japanese sort of way. But I knew no one would believe it was an old tool and most would say: "it is just a rock". That truly detracts from my ability to enjoy the beauty of this item.

Another example is a glass "arrowhead" I just found in northern Taunton. It is obviously pretty, obviously an arrowhead and, yet, having trouble believing an Indian would still be making arrowheads with glass when metal was available spoils it. Not being able to believe it is Indian, makes it not beautiful - even though it is, objectively.

Both examples show the influences of non-visual components of a visual experience. So the beauty of a physical object includes a psychological construct I put around the object that makes the object's beauty dependent on its share-ability with others.

But then, this makes up for some of the pain.

Whining about how hard it is to find arrowheads in Massachusetts

I watch these YouTubes of arrowhead hunting in other parts of the US with total jealousy and almost always it is because those f*ckers have got some kind of terrain advantage. It just doesn't seem fair. So at least I should get to complain. Fact of the matter is that a good contemporary arrowhead collection from Massachusetts might have a hundred arrowheads, the ones from other places look like they must number in the thousands. Here is my list of why it is hard to find arrowheads in Massachusetts:

1. No bare dirt. Everything is covered with vegetation or dead vegetation. You are limited to farms, constructions sites, dirt roads, eroding banks, seashores. Out west, everything is exposed.

2. The creeks are all silted in from past farming and excessive fertilizer use. Our brooks have cattails along the side, not gravel banks. Down South and in the Midwest they seem to have clear creeks that cut through habitation levels. I don't know where you might find that kind of terrain in Massachusetts. Certainly not in southern MA where there are long estuaries and no bluffs (I know of).

3. Lousy tool-making materials. Best is quartz or what ever blew in on the glacier - some rhyolites. A mudstone here or there. No cherts. No obsidian. We barely have decent quartzite and basalt.

4. Sea level rise and the lack of pre-glacial archeology. When the glacier melted, this was a rugged boreal environment. Out in the great basin, it was a lush pluvial environment with plenty of arrowheads being produced. 

BUT I CANNOT FIGURE OUT WHERE TO LOOK FOR ARROWHEADS IN FALMOUTH! Is it only on Devil's Foot?

5. Finally, there just are few farms left. The land is worth more for housing. Those that remain are  "boutique" farms, often just hayfields. In the last few years there has been a move towards "regenerative farming" which forbids plowing. That means arrowhead hunters last line of defense  - the cornfield - may soon be gone. 

Then, all that will be left is the coastline and an occasional construction site. I cannot figure out the coastline. Do I have to dig? It is all very frustrating.