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.