Rosie, my peapod on Ram Island, looking at Devil's Foot

Unspeakable science

This does not seem like much fun:

I heard the pyramids were made of Lego blocks.

Don't know yet if it is really big Lego blocks, or if the pyramids are actually very small.

The Red Dragon Roaster

They are so sensitive about names that Red Dragons adopted a once-a-year festival, called the Roaster, where they can insult each other without fear of repercussion. Using a name in the insult is considered particularly witty. 

Some dragons are not as witty as others: "Ya? Your mother is fat". Says one. "Well at least I know who my mother was", replies another, "I heard your eggs were swapped". 

The cuddling scene from "The Boy and the Dragon", and White Dragons

Esque and Tom finally make it to Albergarthwe (Aireilgrthe...[spellings and pronunciations vary]) and burst in on the room where Llel and Wend are hanging out. They are cuddling together by the fire and, at a later date, an egg is produced. The reunion of Esque and her Mom is heartwarming. Tom's presence causes a stir. [Actually the reunion needs to happen before the cuddling, cuz Llel will be too worried before being reunited with Esque.]

In the short term this allows for a discussion of Dragon genetics - TBD. In the long term, a Dragon egg is produced. This is part of the miracle at the end of the story.

There is a discussion of White Dragons. These are quite small, usually around 8 inches. They live in the forest and are little known. They do not have the same vocal chords as the larger dragons, and make sounds by flapping their wings. They can understand human speech - it is not too fast- but they speak at the same rate as larger dragons. So there is still a communication barrier. EVERYONE speaks English.

White Dragons are very data centric and pedantic.

At the bookseller's - scene from The Boy and the Dragon

The Naysayer is curious about dragons: "Maybe we should find out something about dragons before we...". So he goes down the bookseller's street and finds "A Field Guide to the Dragons" by Robertroy Peterson (or some modified name). The book is by a woman, who we refer to as the "Wise Woman", and the vendor says: "Oh yeah. She is still alive".

So the Naysayer locates the Wise Woman and goes to ask her about dragons.

Update: Maybe the book is old, not recent, but by an author whose descendants still exist (or they were republishing the 610th edition). As the Naysayer is leafing through the book, he notices a picture of the national flag. But it is wrong. The current flag shows a white man and a white dragon facing each other on a field of blue. The man holds a sword out towards the dragon. But in this old book, the flag depicts the man without a sword. Later, when the Naysayer meets the Wise Woman, she can tell him a little of the history of how the sword got added and how ancient texts talk about cooperation between people and dragons.

***

In case I don't mention it elsewhere, we must include General Otto and his troops. Perhaps Tom's dad is a soldier, while his mom is a special needs language teacher (part time help in the castle kitchen). Tom is slightly dyslexic, which is why he prefers going fishing. Tom wants his Dad's approval.

Re those troops: General Otto sends out several companies and Llel trashes some of the companies. We start a scene with LLel parting the rushes and finding Tom's dad. Or perhaps she had just finished slaughtering other soldiers and has pity for Tom's dad, who represents no threat.

One supposes a human society with aristocrats who are contemptuous of the "peasants". In the Kings council meeting, when Bulvanius speaks, the Naysayer expects nothing more than buffoonery and bombast [but since Bulvanius is fabulously wealthy everyone listens politely]. But when Richard Richard (AKA Thornton] speaks, the Naysayer is more concerned - knowing he is the ultimate manipulator. Also, Richard Richard, is the captain of the King's personal guard. (He needs money to finance his daughter's wedding, believing that anyone he can afford isn't good enough for her. Ultimately, this leads him to pursue dragon treasure, to acquire the wealth.)

The Naysayer, Selkirk, can be the minister of mines. Bulvanius is minister of taxes and finance. These ministers are all present in the original council meeting. So is general Otto. All of these positions are inherited. Possibly Bulvanius is also called "Blothar Malvus", by another character who never gets names straight.

Elastocaloric cooling

 Use the properties of elastocaloric wire, to make refrigerator clothing.

Scene from near the end of the "Boy and the Dragon"

There is a room full of dragons and a delegation of humans. The dragons are chattering amongst themselves and Tom introduces Esque to the other humans with the words "This is my friend Esque".

The room suddenly goes quiet. A dragon, in back, leans towards a colleague and says: "Did he just say what I thought he said?" [CORRECTION: Only the young dragons in the room understand what was said, and they translate for their elders.]

Words and names have special meaning for dragons. Dragons are very particular about names. To get a name wrong or make a bad pun can be a deadly insult and get you killed. And no human has called a dragon "friend" in many thousand years. But the dragons remember what it means. 

And just as suddenly the dragons start talking again, excited about what just happened. Humans and dragons have been named FRIENDS!

The standard view - in two colors

 

Refrigerator clothing

Minnesotans wear warm clothes during the winter. How about clothes that cool you down during a hot summer in Las Vegas? People cannot go outside for several months there. We are talking about active cooling rather than passive cooling.

Just a thought

I woke up from a dream about a complex linguistic operation that, for some -possibly anatomical- reason, turned out to be extremely simple. It reminds me that there may be a number of things that are actually topological in how we think: so that a homotopy is almost instantaneous.

What comes to mind as an example - now that I am awake - is the nature of dependence. For example: 

I depend on my grandmother sending me money to pay the rent

According to my theory, a dependency is a shortcut where the connection between getting money and paying the rent is so intuitive that it does not need to be said. How about:

I need warm clothing to enjoy a trip to Greenland

So let me wonder: is the shortcut a homotopy? 

Similarly when someone describes what happened and someone else says: "Yes that is true".

I submitted "The Moving Topic"

I could not hold off any longer on submitting this article. It is my life's work - in so far as I started observing the behavior or "or" and "and" in college; spent time in graduate school inventing little notations; gave it all up to get a Ph.D. and a job. Over the years of working on applied math and algorithms I ended up doing a lot more user interface design than you would expect from a mathematician. So I have some skill in simplifying ideas. 

Then, in the 11th hour, these ideas were re-invigorated by a technical challenge of automatic text processing, at Dentsply. So I pulled out my love of inventing little languages, and put together "narrative notation", as a way to describe natural language expressions. User interface design skill has something to do with the narrative "elements" I settled on. I got focused on topic-specific language processing, and ended up building Narwhal which is a chatbot development platform. The ideas work pretty well but the approach is is labor intensive. 

When I started retirement, I focused on finishing Narwhal so I could be sure to have a working platform to demonstrate the ideas. When it was pretty much in place, I kept a couple pages of typed notes about the truisms. When I finished Narwhal, I was looking around for something else to work on. I mentioned to an older lady that I planned to write an archaeology book "later". She told me I better get going asap. So writing "A Shadow Under the Rock" became my main task. Which filled in the early years of the pandemic, then got self-published on Amazon. I have sold about 100 copies so far, with one or two new orders per month. This, again, left me with nothing to do. 

So I pulled out the two pages of notes on truisms and with a vague desire to give them a theoretical basis. I thought: Maybe if I start writing down what I know about truisms, some kind of result or mathematics will emerge. Miraculously that is what happened. 

I was focused on "narrative continuity"  - what makes language hold together and avoid non-sequiturs. The truisms play a key role in that definition. So what with one thing and another, I tightened the definitions and the ideas, as I wrote. And by the time I got to defining "continuity" clearly, I was starting to describe narrative equivalence and was able to make an almost casual observation: that continuous narrative "path" equivalence  - in any of a variety of ways -  gives the basic definition of truth. An amazingly simple idea, everyone understands intuitively, that never was clearly defined. This was the "content" I was hoping for. In the 11th hour I created a new branch of logic, a new approach to AI, and a wonderful collection of ideas.

I could not be happier with my intellectual activity during retirement . So, today I submitted the article to an "Oxford Journal" called (a bit pretentiously) Pbilosophia Mathematica. I have been polishing the article and the cover letter for months. It was time to submit it. 

And now, I have to figure out what to think about next.

I would not want to close out this discussion of history, without being clear that my insecurity has always been present. I was insecure to go to BU rather than MIT or Harvard. But I learned phenomenology in Boston - while the opponent theory was being promoted across the river in Cambridge, MA. When I submitted "The Moving Topic" to a journal, I made sure it was Oxford and not Cambridge. Because that other Cambridge, the one in Britain, was the original home of people like Russell and Wittgenstein who I both revere and hold in contempt. Brilliant guys who never figured it out - mainly cuz they were in too big a hurry to get to the math.

Update:  Of course it was rejected because the reviewer already knew all about Narrative.

Yellow shoes, umbrella, sweet potato, and oarlocks

 

Pegging Aristotle

I am pretty much done with my paper on the "Moving Topic". In it, I cover quite a lot of territory, from the basis of cooperative behavior, to irony, to the attractiveness of scientific theories of Newton, Lagrange, etc., to the definition of imponderables like: "truth", "causality", "free will", "space", etc.......Good Stuff!

I was and remain worried that the paper does not have any significant content but I have to recognize that figuring out a very reasonable definition of "truth" is, in fact, significant - especially since it is a topological concept of homotopy. Again, good stuff! But it is sad that I am not likely to be around when or if my theories are ever understood or praised. Also, I am afraid to stop writing because, I could forget all the details in the blink of an eye, and then what will my identity be?

The weird feeling I have is that I have sodomized Aristotle, and I am ducking, waiting to be spanked for the act. If I submit the paper to an academic journal, that is exactly what is likely to happen...that and the forgetting.

Black bean and cheddar empanadas

I had some left-over "blanks" from empanada making, rolled them out, and filled them with refried black beans from a can, bits of cheddar cheese, and baked at 420 for ~20 minutes. Something about them, perhaps the flakey dough, after it had rested 24 hours in the fridge, made them particularly good.

Dough - see empanada dough recipe for 2 cups of flour. Divided into 16 pieces.

Filling - Goya refried black beans (~4 tablespoons per empanada); a couple small pieces of cheese.

Bake at 420 for ~20 minutes.

A DeMorgan Law derived from Narrative

Wanting to relate narratives to the traditional Boolean “calculus”, here are some of the kinds of assumptions needed for a test case:

·        A kind of  temp_collection {A,B, C, … } that can be interchanged with the comma-separated narrative pattern ‘A,B,C,…’

·        Blocking this kind of temp_collection replaces it with a temp_collection having each of its elements blocked. In other words (A,B,C,…)* is equivalent to (A*,B*,C*,…).

With those assumptions we can limp towards a derivation of the De Morgan Law

not( A or B ) = not( A ) and not( B ).

First to represent “A or B” in our current framework, we put A and B in a temp_collection, along with a blockage of the alternatives. Thus ‘A or B’ is written:

{ []*, A, B }

To negate that, we write

{ []*, A, B }*

Distributing the outer blockage, gives us

{ []**, A*, B*}

Which “writes back out” as the narrative [], A*,B*. This is endpoint equivalent to ‘A*,B*’. The ‘,’ is transcribed as “and”.

This gives us a hint at doing traditional logic with narratives  - with a heavy reliance on temp_collection behavior and blockage properties. It would be worth isolating the narrative equivalences needed to support a discussion of the infinite. 

The definition of "truth"

Wow! I had no idea they were still so confused about the definition(s) of "TRUE". So here it is:

We distinguish three types of truth: 

• Tautological truth - which follows from the mechanics of symbol definition and persistence of meaning.
• A priori truth - which follows from definitions
• A posteriori truth - which is an observable equating of different paths towards the same outcome

Tautological includes "A=A" and possible others

A Priori includes at least two kinds of definition. The "x is a kind of y", leads to "peanuts are legumes". And the "x is part of y" leads to "you need ingredient to cook".

A Posteriori is the most interesting version of truth. It says: Two methods for producing the same outcome are equal  - if all you care about is the outcome. For example "2+2=4" is TRUE. Note that it is NOT true if you are listing partitions of 4. The truth depends on the assumptions you make.

I gotta crow a little cuz several thousand years of philosophers never spotted that ignoring intermediate step and the equality of outcome, is the definition of "truth". 

Update: OK, OK, maybe there is another kind of truth. There are behaviors whose repetition guarantees certain things: Adding material is transitive ("More is more"). Containment is transitive ("if a in b and b in c, then a in c"). Getting from A to B is transitive because if I can get to C from B, then I can get from A to C - it just takes longer. Another is: is A can be substituted for B and B can be substituted for C, then A can be substituted for C.

The orchid's insurance

As an example of how it is easy to say nonsense with the 'part' symbol '.', I picked two random topics: flowers and insurance,

The idea is that for random topics P, and Q, the P.Q would be nonsense. But perhaps there is a kindOf P and a kindOf Q where it is not nonsense? 

We imagine a very special orchid, being shipped and someone insuring it against damage. Now the "orchid's insurance" makes sense.

Cup of Tea

Using this for my iPhone screen

Feelin' good

I am kind of enjoying life at age 71. My health is an issue - especially breathing, but there are good days and bad days and you try to ignore night-time pains in favor of day-time ideas. In particular I am sustaining myself with trying to finalize The Moving Topic paper.

Yesterday I finally got something straight in the logic: you cannot preserve "nesting" hierarchical structure within the "flat" sequence of topics making up the ledger. To store the hierarchical info is to admit defeat. So I decide to ignore the possibility of deep nesting, in favor of simple data. This is a second example of the kind of tough design decisions I have been forced to, in the last month. The other involved getting VIRTUE, BLOCKAGE, 'causes', and 'enables' defined and initialized in the right places to, again, keep the data as simple as possible. But finally, I feel like these ideas are correct - everything is in place and I just need to polish the paper.

Trying to be a better blues player - simpler, calmer takes up much of the day. I sit at my table, guitar to my right, pot also to my right on the table, and ideas in front of my eyes. And I get through the day watching TV and switching between these activities. I cook but, recently, my meals have not been very good. Food costs are a worry. Travel costs are too, since Barb's car just died and we cannot afford a replacement. But at this moment, all is well. It is a crisp, August day. We'll go out in my boat or perhaps to the beach later. I am going to smoke a little something and re-read yesterdays writing. 

On the other hand, we cannot afford high-quality maple syrup.

A delicate bit of logic

I have been wrestling with how narrative structure, which allows for multiple levels of nested sub-narrative as well as the ability to negate sub-narratives, could be recorded in a sequence of topic structures. Finally I decided it does not matter because in practice, deep layers of nested negations, do not occur. We negate the attribute. We negate the topic and, when things get more complicated, we negate stories - which themselves are single topics.

But when it comes to negating a sequence of topics, as a group, we may overwrite pre-existing sub-groups that are already blocked in sub-narratives. The only way to keep track of the actual nesting, without flattening it with some algorithm, is to keep track of a tree. The tree could be stored extra-topically, or encoded and saved within single topics. Either way we get into a world of pain because then the topic sequence, by itself, is no longer the only content. Which defeats the purpose of the approach I have been trying to achieve. The whole point is that nesting of sub-narratives is lost, in a "flat" sequence of topics.

So I am willing, for now, to live with the idea of blocking whatever you want, at the expense of losing previous blocks. By limiting blockage to attributes and single topics, we make a choice. It may be limiting but maybe it is worth it for the corresponding simplification. If an example comes up forcing a revision I'll be unhappy.

A scene with dragons and cofffee

Wend, the senior Crag dragon, is talking to Llel and inviting her into the foyer. She enters and says: "Is that coffee I smell?". Wend says "yes". She hasn't had coffee in several hundred years. I turns out the Crag dragons grow a small crop in the hills. They serve her coffee and Llel could not be more pleased.

There needs to be a scene where Llel thinks to herself that Wend is a bit of a clown. But she actually thinks he is funny.

***

The premise is that the kingdom was founded based on dragon/human friendship. But this fact had been lost over several thousand years, while, at the same time, dragons became more rare, and the political situation among men deteriorated - into a monarchy with little power. The dragons did not much like living near people - who tended to be obnoxious - and so dragons mostly lived in remote places. During the same history, the dragons had become more isolated from each other and birth rates were low.

Mathematical Thinking with Cheese

I was getting a slice of American cheese from a package, by feel, planning to cover a piece of toast with it. But I wanted to see the piece I was taking and other pieces left behind, to judge whether I could piece together enough cheese to cover the toast. I was thinking it did not matter which pieces I used, as long as the toast was fully covered.

One sees this as an example of “mathematical thinking”, where the equivalence of two narratives (alternate ways of piecing the cheese together) are considered equivalent because they produce the same result. This shows the ubiquity of such choices in daily actions and highlight ‘narrative’ as a way to describe alternative plans.

When a commentator speaks from the heart

Just so I won't forget this example: I was listening to a familiar podcast, and the commentator began saying something personal. Usually they are reading or telling a story that has been put together previously.

I felt a brief sense of awkwardness when switching to listening with the assumption that now the source of the story was the person speaking. It went from being about a story to being simply a story.

Triumph and Biumph

For some reason, this went through my insomniac mind. "Quadraumph"?

My best equations

I hope I am remembered for these:

The 'dot' in the first expression is function composition. The '*' in the second is inbalance.

The first says that 'e ^' estimates a classifier 'e' by measuring (mu), picking a best model with those measurements (phi) and classifying that. In other words, things are classified by how the nearest ideal example is classified - stratified by measurement values. I.E. recognition is a lifting.

The second says that conflict is resolved. 

Plum cake

 I had too many ripe plums I did not want to eat. So I sliced them up, salted them, baked them at 200 for an hour and then added them to a standard white cake recipe - which I cribbed from some other plum cake recipe:

1 stick salted butter

3/4 cup sugar

1/2 tsp salt

2 eggs

1 tsp baking powder

1 cup flower

Cream the butter and sugar, stir in eggs one by one, mix as fluffy as possible. Fold in dry ingredients, mixing as little as possible. Add baked plum fragments. Bake 350 for ~1 hour (or until fork comes out dry).

Note there is a lot of liquid in the plums. Pre-baking the plums removes some of it. Baking the cake a little longer than usual is needed. The source of my cake recipe says it is good to let the juices diffuse into the cake overnight before eating it.

Not minding that it hurts

The famous scene in Lawrence of Arabia, where Peter O'Toole burns himself with a match. His colleague asks: "What is the trick?". O'Toole answers: "The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts".

This seems like pretty good advice for dealing with something that makes you sad.

Update: but it is awful advice for someone who could get an infection.

A guilty little secret of formal logic

The problem with borrowing words from natural language (like "and", "or", "if") to define entities of formal logic, is that there is nothing to prevent the words from being used in their original natural sense, in the middle of what is  supposed to be a formal argument. 

The reason this is not actually a problem is because the formal definitions are close to being correct and a good duplication of the natural word usages. I think it is possible to define an exact duplication of the natural word usage - so that we do not need to worry about that any more.

How do you know when Bertrand Russell has completed a proof?

 Because he stops talking.

Woods Hole becomes Mathematics

I want to tell anyone who finds themselves reading this, that I have benefitted greatly from living in Woods Hole (or being able to stay here in the summer and now all the time). I sat here, year after year, peacefully thinking about the most abstract things possible. And now, about 67 years in, I am writing my final ideas in the paper The Moving Topic. I look out the window: it is still peaceful out there.

Please consider, that The Moving Topic to be the distillation of Woods Hole into logic. I think the place gets the credit.

Overheard at the grocery store

Living the dream?

One day at a time.

The definition of Math

I have decided that the most characteristic thing about Math is the way it ignores intermediate steps. I call that the original sin of mathematics. Every equation, like "2+2" equals "4" is an ignoring of the difference between two narratives. They end up in the same place. 

Consider the Piaget concept of "object permanence", where a child learns that things can be hidden but still exist. Isn't that lesson based on knowing the outcome is the same, whether or not the object is hidden? I take it then, that this early cognitive processing is, in some sense, Math. Even earlier a baby would have learned about object "constancy", meaning moving things did not change.

Why formal logic definitions are a mess

I have a growing list of complaints. One basic problem with logic is that it tries to be timeless and tries to have the meaning of an expression limited to the words in the expression. Narrative reaches into the past and the future with it's implicit meanings. Here is a list of problems with the definitions of formal logic.

One basic problem is that math co-opts natural language but has no safeguards to ensure that the co-opted version is what people actually use in the midst of a proof. Eg phrase "if A then B" subsumes so many different concepts that the transitivity of the relation is in question, having only been established for the things being subsumed but never for a mixture of such things. Again, there are no guardrails to ensure this. [I actually think Russell was aware of this but, other than admonishing the audience, he proceeds.]

Truth: 

• This is called an 'undefined' constant. It is never established that way. In fact it has a several distinct meanings that are being suppressed for the definition but (inevitably) used in actual practice. There is no way to establish the truth of a proposition using the rules of logic, so what is the point of relying on 'truth' to define logic?
• Put another way, to say "true" is an undefined constant leaves it unclear how we know something is true? For example: "If you count from one to ten then you must pass five". This is true but how can we believe it is the same as the  undefined constant version of "true"? In fact, why would it be? 
  

Circularity: 

• I count three places in the definition of "and" where they use the 'and' concept. Once explicitly, to define 'and' using "and"; and then subtly in the 'newline' needed for additional rules of "detachment". Alternatively you see a definition in terms of truth tables which is un-objectionable but also empty. Also boolean tables have rows and columns which serve as 'and' mechanisms. Those un-acknowledged  mechanism are what actually performs the definition, not the undefined zeros and ones.
• Consider this bit of gibberish:

Logical implication is a logical relation between two propositions in which the second is a logical consequence of the first1234. It means that if the first proposition is true, then the second proposition must also be true2534. Logical implication is also known as implication, logical consequence, implies, or If... then234.

So who defines "logical consequence"? And what is with the "if...then" in the second definitions? 

Overlapped Definitions:

• The idea that there are more logical operators than logical operations shows that the latter have not been factored correctly.
• Isn't it a little embarrassing, every time you say "or" to follow it with "but not both". The word "or" in natural language means choose one and has never meant "both". So, OR and XOR. Which is it? Also, why would natural language speakers find themselves using a locution like "and/or"?
  

Deliberate Obfuscation:

• The meaning of "if A then B" is entirely artificial, co-opting natural language and then adding insult to injury by bullying the reader. It means: replace A with B cuz I said so! To be fair, it is a shorthand for skipping steps and its transitivity is established by ignoring intermediate steps.

Lack of clarity on 'universal' vs 'particular'

• It is elementary in computer programming to distinguish between a class definition and a class instance. The idea is less crisp in textbooks on logic. Mathematicians submit themselves to obfuscating different kinds of sets, so "man", "men", "mankind", "Socrates", ... these are difficult for ma-man Russell.

Non-atomic "atoms":

• The "universal quantifiers" 'for all' and 'there exist' are not fundamental but derived from simpler operations: stepping through elements of a set, testing for each element for pattern match/mis-match, employing different exit strategies for ending the testing. Iteration and pattern matching are clearly more fundamental. So why are these derived concepts taken as starting points? [Answer: so that the ideas of "all" and "some" can apply when we skip the step of defining the iteration/matching/exit.]

Finally, there are serious issues with treating all propositions and entities as equivalent and existing on the same "playing field". Bertrand Russell was the first to express doubts about the types of entities collected in a set but logicians, concerned with the infinite, overlook problems with very finite entities. No one would say, in natural language, that the a dot's color is "red and green". It would be considered incoherent for someone to say a cup was "red or shiny". This un-secured nonsense shows the necessity of treating different types of attribute in different ways.

Update:  There is a different thing wrong with the example of "All men are mortal". You do not need the "All" and the issues it brings with it. Instead you can simply observe that the definition of 'man' adds requirements to the definition of 'mortal'. You do not need any single example for the a priori truth of the statement. I am not sure what Russell's excuse would be for getting this wrong. Another place where he is hoisted on the petard of his own intention/extension ambiguity.

Hollyhocks outside my window

 

Inventing little languages

For the record, in college I was worried about Ontology and the name relation. I studied the inverse of quotation marks, as a notation to help express ideas about naming. I played with definitions of 'truth' leading to ideas of probability in finite collections of 'if-then' statements. I majored in Philosophy. Took symbolic logic (from a guy named Webb) and was puzzled by the idea that "but" meant the same thing as "and".

For the record, I spent a while in early grad school thinking about simplified algebraic entities I called "lingos". They were sets, closed under a binary operation. I played with different forms of set theory being embodied in different forms of element '∈' definitions. I was always interested in little algebraic systems. I played with semi-groups, and normed semi-groups. None of it was very deep. I had to quit all that to focus on passing Math exams and get a Ph.D. in Mathematics.

Later as a software engineer I spent a good deal of time designing user interface features and time trying to understand basic programming constructs such as memory versus program - data versus instruction.

And finally, I have been looking hard at the basic meanings of "and" and "or" ever since I read Bertrand Russell admitting confusion about them (which he forgot about later in his career). That might have been before college. Understanding these has only been possible lately with a clear articulation of the '*' and ','  narrative elements.

The point is that I have actually been thinking about these things my whole life.

What happened to the 4th of July?

It's the 4th of July and 3:20 PM and I have not yet heard one single explosion. Used to be the bangs would have started the night before. What is going on? I cannot talk to my neighbors cuz they might turn out to be Zionists.

Red dragons to the rescue

Comes a time when things have started to get out of hand. The green dragons see the red dragons flying in, at a distance. One comments: "Not a moment too soon".

Later the red dragons get pissed off and melt a tower. Which folds over on itself in a curious shape that, in later years, becomes an important tourist attraction.

[Red Dragons are comic relief characters. They seem to routinely burn themselves and incinerate things by mistake. Approaching one carelessly can result in accidental death]

There has to be scenes with Lell talking to Wend, and dealing with his thick highland brogue. Everybody speaks English. Different forms of dragon insult emerge - messing with names being particularly rude.

***

We were talking about the historic background and the current situation dominated by the Knight Industrial Complex and the Armorer's Guild. The fake dragon was their idea, in council.

Things to see in Woods Hole they don't tell you about

Having watched videos about the lobster rolls, lighthouses, and beaches around the Cape, it is clear that most people see the Cape as they would see any other part of the east coast. Here are some things to do around Woods Hole that even the locals may not know about:

 - Stroll out Penzance Point and admire the estates

 - Get lost in BB Woods.

 - Visit the Indian Mounds at Flume Pond

 - Watch the Cape Cod Knockabout Races (Woods Hole Yacht club has the schedule)

 - Friday Evening Lectures at the MBL (and the Falmouth Forum in wintertime)

 - Sippewisset Beach - the wading river and beach sands are great for kids

 - Atlantic White Cedar Swamp

 - Fishing for False Albacore from the NOAA jetty

(Occasional)

 - Tour of the Neil Armstrong Research Vessel, at WHOI

 - Woods Hole Film Festival

 - Woods Hole Model Boat show

Who has "got" that pop fly - in baseball?

Sometimes in baseball, the batter hits a pop fly up and over towards the outfield, about 1/2 way between two of the outfielders. They both prepare to catch the ball and then both leave it to the other fielder, and the ball drops between them. This is called a blooper. The same thing happens in doubles tennis, when a ball comes down the center of the court and each of the players on the receiving side leave it to the other player - and the ball goes between them. With a bit of a stretch, here goes an analogy....

Something similar has happened in the gap between the fields of language and mathematics. On one side of the gap, mathematicians think they have gotten all they need from language and that linguists have the rest covered. After all, the parts of speech have been identified and sentence structure has been completely understood. Meanwhile linguists think they have gotten all they need from language and that mathematicians have the rest covered. After all, the workings of logic have been extracted from language and are completely understood. 

I claim there is an important "ball" of content being dropped between these two fields of study: the central topic of meaning. Both mathematicians and linguists seem incapable of coming to grips with a good definition of "meaning" or "truth" and I wonder if any current practitioners think the other team has it figured out? 

The whole point of having a crisply defined data structure to store the content of external expressions is that it implements meaning. You can argue about the proper data structure but the conversation moves way from vagueness in important details. 

Hollyhocks - June 2024

 

Not my best effort but I can try again as the flowers develop. In this photo, the colors came out closer to what I wanted than the actual drawing did.

Dialog with a Foolish Mathematician

Me: You don't even know what "truth" means.

FM: I don't need to, as long as arguments follow the laws of logic, truth is preserved. Eg the Boolean Truth Tables for and, or, not, and implication.

Me: If I count from 1 to 10 then I pass 5. That is true Right? 

FM: Yes

Me: But it does not follow from the rules of logic or things like the Boolean operators.

FM: Well that is because you have not gone back far enough into the definitions of "1", "5" and "10". Considering the set theoretical definition of cardinal numbers and the successor operation, it is obvious enough that five applications of the successor operator is needed in order to accomplish ten iterations.

Me: Sure, you can muddy the discussion. But let's ignore that what you said just now was circular. More importantly it is irrelevant. For one thing, you have shifted the goal posts from formal logic, to formal logic plus (some form of) arithmetic. For another you ignored the question. Here let me prove that you are wrong (I speak) "One, two, three, four, Johnny, six, seven, eight, nine, ten". Huh? What do you know, you do not always pass "five".

FM: Yeah but that is not counting.

Me: So in order to understand truth, now you find yourself having to understand the underlying nature of naming, pattern recognition, similarity, counting, and much more that is prior to the Boolean Tables. When you are done, the value of the concept of "truth" is seriously diminished. Maybe it is not so foundational and could be discarded.

Resolving issues in subplots

One wonders whether unresolved issues in a subplot need to be resolved.

I am watching a movie where a person looses their car keys down a sewer opening. As soon as it happened and the movie switched to another scene, I knew I was not going to be happy till we went back and found those keys.

Example of VIRTUE transfer

I have an upstairs and a downstairs kitchen. The same kettle boils faster upstairs because it is a better stove. The same kettle fills faster at the faucet upstairs because there is better water pressure. So with these two things setting the stage, I think of everything associated with the kettle as being better upstairs than downstairs. 

So, I go to empty the kettle and find myself expecting it to empty more slowly downstairs than upstairs. Of course it makes no difference, but that transfer of negativity goes with the pairing of kettle and downstairs.

Correction: this is actually pattern continuation.

The Boy and the Dragon, scenes II and III

Scene II: The Naysayer visits the wise woman to ask about dragons. She assures him that, in fact,  dragons are not mythological nor extinct and that, for example, a Crag dragon had been spotted in Aireilgrthe several years ago. Here are introduced various theories about dragons - mostly not correct. She explains about Red dragons and Green dragons. Red ones live in groups and are social. Green ones tend to be solitary. She says that red dragons are shy and avoid human contact. Actually they are aggressive but too busy to bother with humans. 

Scene III: The lair of some Crag dragons - a type of Red dragon. They have extremely high metabolisms and are argumentative. They eat rocks and can vomit small bits of lava. In this scene a young red dragon is practicing hypersonic dives across a ridge in a high wind - almost too fast to see. The lowland carryings on with the fake red dragon have been noticed by these dragons and they don't like it a bit. It is insulting. There is some argument. Also some technical facts here about dragons and how they stopped making their own technology around the time of the IBM Selectric typewriter*. It was easier to steal it from humans. Now dragons were mostly agriculturalists. Red dragons were famous for their wines. 

* Maybe you could have a scene with a red dragon, wearing glasses and trying to take apart a delicate gear assembly. His claws keep getting in the way and he fumbles a small part on the floor. "Shit!" he says and emits a small belch, melting the whole thing by mistake. 

It is tempting to have commentary to the effect that red dragons can spit on themselves by mistake, causing minor pain, like stubbing your toe.

My son's girlfriend asks: why are humans and dragons not getting along? The history of how the King's family became "Lord of Dragons" has been forgotten - it was about being friends with dragons rather than antagonists. As it turns out: dragons (older ones) speak so slowly, humans cannot make out what is being said. People talk too fast, dragons think it sounds like bursts of squeaking. You don't want to stand near a Red dragon when he asks "Hun?". However, young dragons like Esque talk so quickly and are so acute, they can communicate with people. Esque and Tom are the first dragon/person friendship in a long time.

Orcas attacking sailboats

Let me propose the reason for recent Orca attack on yachts (in the news).  Since they attack the rudder, perhaps the fluttering of the rudder  (which can happen) is unpleasant for them.

A little paradox of order

 This is from my college era. Consider:

Left to Right

One can say you are reading left to right. Now what about this:

Right to Left

Are you reading left to right or right to left?

[Of course this is the usual nonsense of use versus mention.]

Woods Hole and song sparrows

It makes me feel nostalgia for Woods Hole and the generations of song sparrow I listened to here. 

Song sparrows, fog rolling in, ... honeysuckle. 

At the moment, the sparrow singing outside caught my attention by how its song pattern-matched something in my memory from a sparrow last summer. It is probably the same bird. I had tried to memorize the song. A friend of mine and I used to whistle the melody of one particular song sparrow - to let each other know when we were approaching.

Clouds are bacterial colonies

Seems like a truth.

Transitivity of Containment

Back to the example: the present is in the box and the box is in the garage, therefore the present is in the garage.

In my linguistic paper, I came to understand that a preposition like "in" is a persistent state achieved after an event. So, a present can be found in a box by opening the box and looking inside. Similarly [but not identically] a box can be found in the garage by going to the garage and scanning from side to side, top to bottom. If there are several boxes they can be opened one by one.

If we are willing to string together the two activities: going to the garage and scanning, plus opening the box and looking inside, then the "containment" is demonstrated by achieving the same result - finding the present. 

***

So, you know, I am kind-of thinking this is idle abstract masturbation. But I don't think it is. If you really wanted to understand the infinite in mathematics, which appears to be a biproduct of which set theory assumptions you accept, then details about how a persistent state is achieved through events becomes relevant. You want to investigate the axiom of choice? Think about how sets are formed, how membership is tested, and how review and selection work for this kind of set.

Definition of measurement

In my paper I write about numeric values being "derived from measurement" prior to assumptions about arithmetic or magnitude. A measurement involves two things. Typically one is variable and the other is "constant" or in some way standardized. The constant is derived from the variable. 

For a range of standardized items (constants) if you can run through them and stop when you find a match, that is one way to measure. Any function from the variables to the constants is a measurement.

 

AI assisted butchery

A friend sent an article about automated chicken and beef butchery using AI. I responded:

That's hilarious. We have had machine vision assisted manufacturing for about 40 years. Now we get to call it AI?

I admit, an automated chicken poses interesting pattern recognition and alignment problems. These certainly could be assisted by an easy to train lookup mechanism a la AI. But I have to feel a bit sorry for the people who had to train the system using dead chickens.

Chinese dumpling wrapper

 According to SoupedUp "Mandy":

400 g of (high protein) flour

210 g of water

1/2 tsp salt

-----------------

I convert this to 

3.2 cups flour

.89 cups water

1/2 tsp salt

-----------------

That's a pretty dry dough. Did I convert it wrong? I am thinking to try:

3 cups flour

1 cup water

1/2 tsp salt.

Mandy points out that after the mixture has rested for a half hour or so, it should be kneaded carefully for 5-8 minutes. She says "do your best" - meaning this is important.

Reading Old Writings

Due to some basement flooding, I have been airing out the paper contents of a box containing my old writings. These consist primarily of a set of notebooks, starting from when I was an adolescent traveling in Europe, through to when I was in graduate school. I stopped routine writing when I had to concentrate on the final PhD exams. There are a few entries from the years when I was first married and later. There are also various sketches and pictures as well as some old letters. 

The vast majority of what I wrote concerned my attempts to find my own way through some kind of constructivist/idealist logic. Looking back at it, it looks like mostly gobbledygook. A great deal of clarity is provided by today's theory of the Moving Topic. I also wrote about loneliness, looking for sex and love, and about the first years of marriage when I wasn't happy. My early years in Minneapolis in graduate school were particularly painful but also fun in their own way. Luckily things began to warm up when I left academics and there are traces of a happier person emerging. 

There are also some old math papers published and un-published. I am pretty sure I was on the edge of some good math but was not a strong enough thinker to pull it off. For example the theory of bi-measures holds hints about solving the Blaschke inversion transform [finding a domain shape from its distribution of chord lengths] using the Bmn(). And the theory of derivatives of the associate function being Tauberian and all my struggles to define asymptotic behavior of a curve in terms of "basis" curves with simple derivative behavior. I did not pull these things over the finish line and I blame my weakness.

There are plenty of surreal pictures and surreal poems and stream of conscious bull. There is a naturalism that I can be proud of and a flawed character that -what can you say- I had to live with.

Haptics and Pornography

They are starting to study bi-directional digital "skin" that transmits or receives touch information. Since it is a no brainer I have been discussing for some time, let me state the obvious pornographic uses:

You wrap the "skin" around one thing and stroke it or insert it for a person wearing it to receive at the other end of the signal.

I claim this idea. As soon as they reduce the lag time to something immediate.

The skies in her eyes...

 The skies in her eyes were usually gray

It made me realize she had nothing to say

But her ass was on fire and did inspire

So I listened intently anyway

Chipping away at the concept of transitivity

Let's start with: 

- A penny is in my pocket and my pocket in in my pants, so the penny is in my pants.

- The present is in a box and the box is in the garage, so the present is in the garage.

I think we regard these as examples of the transitivity of "in" only by ignoring differences. To be "in a box" is not really the same relation as "in the garage". Here, to be "in" implies certain steps one can take to locate something. Clearly, opening the box is an additional step. All of which gets suppressed. Similarly, and more easily justified: to be "in the pocket" is not the same as to be "in the pants".

First Osprey 2024

Just saw one. Note the date: March 30. Last year it was March 29. As I have said, the New Yorkers are not far behind.

I know I saw cormorants a week or so ago. I am under the impression they stayed all winter. 

More jokes

World worst screen savers: dead rat..... colonoscopy record....skin tag...

Answering "What are your pronouns?" without understanding the word "pronouns". Eg: "My pronouns are: or, not, and if...then". "My pronouns are: a, the, and another". Or like "me, my, mine". Or "I kind of like Mike Tyson". 

Non-informative information

There should be a word, other than "enshittification", for the providing of additional information that is of no value. Some great examples: showing RPM on a car dashboard with automatic gearing; showing all the most recent durations that have been used for a digital timer. These examples, require an act of 'ignoring': You consume the information and then discard it. This type of energy draining is going on all around me. 

A joke

 Yeah...I used to smoke for a living.

A pretty little bighorn sheep kill zone

This is right above my little hill in Nevada:

It's a 608 ft climb from the valley floor at 3000 ft. 

I am so intrigued by the pink color of the lithic debris, completely different from what is in use at the foot of the hill.

Competitive Artifact Hunting

Here, effectively in private, I can admit that I find arrowhead hunting with your buddies to be a YouTube genre that pisses me off. These guys are down in the Carolinas in places where there are so many arrowheads, all you have to do to find them is look down. They go out in a team and bring home dozens of arrowheads. Each find is accompanied by loud shouts of "Wow its a screamer"..."its a SMOKER"...etc. Or "Aww buddy you got skunked".

These guys understand nothing and teach nothing to the viewer. They do not tell you the materials, the arrowhead styles, any info about the topography. When arrowhead hunting is about picking up the next trinket, then the arrowheads become correspondingly low valued. You do not need to think about or understand prehistory. When I spend months without finding anything, then a single arrowhead becomes very precious - whether or not I communicate that on YouTube. It is not about shouting and competing with your buddies. I have enough pain of loss during those empty months. For me, there is intellectual effort behind the finds - not that I necessarily succeed. The effort makes me aware of things that may help me understand what I am finding.

A day of arrowhead hunting

Sometimes on a good day you find more than one arrowhead. The ensemble takes on a particular life of its own: the life of that day in the field. Each time you go out you have the focus that you bring to the moment and you have the conditions that are there anyway. Out of this and mother luck come a find or two, a deep sense of accomplishment and a frame captured by the arrowheads. I love the stems on these arrowheads:

Or

Woo hoo! Thank you Rhode Island.

First crocus 2024

Note the date. It was Feb 11the last year. So 2 days earlier.

Ridgelines in Nevada

As you walk along a ridgeline in Nevada you had well look down and keep an eye out for arrowheads. Wherever sheep crossed or followed the ridge, hunters have waited - one time or another.

Some kind of Hebbian Principle

Suppose you have a category of things, that all fall under a name - say - "A". If there is an observable of these things that allows the As to be divided into two groups; then the observable becomes an attribute of As. Two sub-categories are created. 

If we lived in a binary world, every type of thing would correspond to one such observable.

Why is a bighorn sheep like a computer program?

The sheep go through a number of XOR gates and wires, as they wander around browsing. There main activity is eating. Not escaping predators. 

But clever people can arrange the wires and XOR gates in anticipation. Then, through quirk of wind or deliberate broadcasting of smell and noise, or through use of well-trained dogs, the sheep can be made more and more uncomfortable. In a panic they worry about what is behind, as they rush into a shallow bowl with hunters hiding on the downwind side.

It is simple: add sheep and stir.

Is that a petroglyph of a hunting site "bullseye"?

I have been collecting pictures of what I call "funnels". The vocabulary hasn't stabilized yet but I am talking about a "bullseye" pattern of: bald spot, surrounded by light ring of lithic debris, surrounded by a heavier ring of lithic debris, surrounded by a one or more concentric rings of fence post holes. Like this:

And like this:

You see this bullseye pattern over and over in the hills around Las Vegas and I dare say: the inner ring of lithic debris might be a good place to go look carefully at the ground ;)

Imagine my surprise to see this petroglyph, which is not a bad match to these bullseyes:

A few sites have some structure or extra debris at the center but mostly not. Here it is again:

Not unreasonable to suspect a connection to sheep:

A funny thing happened when I tried to draw a map of a Nevada prehistoric hunting site

After multiple days of staring at the Nevada desert using Google Earth, I have begun to get a sense of how complicated the ancient's hunting was. So I was trying to sketch the simplest hunting-site configuration. I decided to get cute and add a little figure of a bighorn sheep to represent sheep entering the "trap". And I put a little hunter with a bow at the center of the trap. It was somewhere along in here that I realized I was recreating some of the petroglyphs I have been seeing around Nevada and Utah.

Now it is pretty obvious that petroglyphs depicting bighorn sheep and people with bows and arrows, have something to do with hunting. Why would you need this? Well, one thing is to brag about the hunt but, probably, there were some pretty memorable hunts and it is natural to want to tell the story in a permanent form (like a petroglyph). 

But after I have stared at drive lines leading up to funnels on Google Earth, it occurs to me that some of the abstract "geometric" petroglyphs could be maps of the whole hunting trap - which could be 10 miles across.

I can see how a map of the whole hunting "trap" would be helpful when laying out plans for a particular hunt. The 'leader' probably wants to be very clear about different roles for different members of the hunt - where the leader will be, where the adolescent, the women (?), and the hunters (men?).

The leader has to judge the qualities of the wind and air, perhaps predicting several days of weather, and the sheep need to be spotted or anticipated in the distance. The hunters have had years to learn the traps and update them and I get a vague sense of the possibility that a map can be updated at the same time as its subject matter is updated - and that the above shows glyphs of different ages.

I know, from looking at the pictures of Google Earth that drive lines and separate "Kill Zones" can be too complicated to understand. The landscape was just as complicated in the past. Did they use smoke signals?

So here is my real proposition: it will be found that some of these hunting site petroglyphs match nearby topography and the layout (topological not metric) of a miles-wide hunting trap. [Ths is probably not an original statement.]