indepsim disco: three examples

12.II.1430

Independent simultaneous discoveries dept: 3 examples. the 3rd one cuts the deepest.
1. independent and almost simltaneous development of infinitesimal analysis by Mrrs. Newton and Leibniz.

2. Early in the 19th century, Karl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855) and William Rowan Hamilton (1805-1865) independently and almost simultaneously proposed the idea of defining complex numbers as ordered pairs (a, b) of real numbers endowed with certain special properties. Apostol, Calculus volume I (1967) ch. 9, p. 358.

3. The third ring of Saturn "was first detected by Mr Bond at Cambridge U.S. on November 15, 1850; Mr Dawes, not aware of Mr Bond's discovery, observed it on November 29th, and Mr Lassel a few days -later." Maxwell, Scientific papers of James Clerk Maxwell, Niven ed., Cambridge UP (1890) ch. XIX p. 291.

cf.:
telepathé communication

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Stop improving nature

07.iI.1430

In response to things like , "RuBisCO is very important in terms of biological impact because it catalyzes the most commonly-used chemical reaction by which inorganic carbon enters the biosphere. RuBisCO is also the most abundant protein in leaves, and it may be the most abundant protein on Earth[2]. Given its important role in the biosphere, there are currently efforts to genetically engineer crop plants so as to contain more efficient RuBisCO (see below)," I'd like to say a few words ...


Stop messing with stuff. If it ain't broke don't fix it.
You're paid to keep / use the stuff not improve it.
KISS: Keep It Simple Stupid!

This is not the only instance. I keep running into stories about how some idiots with degrees discover new gene or protein function and then promise to set to work on improving it or making it more pronounced.

Does it occur to anyone in the "biohack" community that stuff is the way it is for not just any reason , but for an OPTIMAL reason ?

Doesn't anyone who funds them realize that?

Hey Monsanto, Archer Daniel Midlands, Go To Jail, Do not collect $300, Do not pass Go.


I looked at Monsanto on the nearest/easiest source, wikipedia. I saw this as their logo(done up with a goofing slogan?)



Hey, Monsanto, stop imagining!

If I had an agribusiness or a biotech affair I wouldn't mind the slogan

"We like it the just way it is"

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what is pneumatics?

25.I.1430

Pneumatics is a certain outlook on knowledge that will take it seriously when it is told things like God blows a life giving breath into living things , and other things which to a "pure reason" scientist are fantastical.

It is a believer's "science" or rather epistemology. For its aim or pretension, it seeks to integrate religious beliefs and scientific knowledge, putting either in the context of the other.

Effectively, pneumatics replaces the a priori assumption of atheism or materialism - alias "pure reason" to some - with the a priori assumption/choice of theism and axioms of religious belief.

Returning to the example pneumatics would accept the notions of a spirit in living organisms and even try to account for it in as empirical or analytical a way as possible.

Thus it will note much like scientists - or indeed elementary school pupils - the things that set "life" apart from inanimate things even though both classes are constituted of the same matter. Namely that they are endowed with complexes of autonomous self-regulating mechanisms. It would note this is the most-physical description possible yet of a soul, a sort of ordering or organizing principle endowed by the Divine.

Unlike modern "science", instead of saying spirit cannot be seen therefore it does not exist until proven otherwise, pneumatology (or pneumatics) having accepted its existence as a given , would say that the closest we've come to seeing "soul" is in that it is closely associated with those homeostatic processes unique to life.

In a further sweep we could even say the "fast" homeostatic mechanisms of life - which must be the result of spirit, also belong to a spectrum or processes that also includes those subitted by inanimate matter - paving the way to rationalising another religious belief - that inanimate matter is not so inanimate after all and that it too is endowed with such things as consciousness comfort and discomfort and so on.


We can recall the italicized greek word "biota" indicates a duality perhaps precisely that of the presence of matter and of something else, the soul in living organisms.

In other words, pneumatics is much ado about how and what religion-believing scientists really think, in the privacy of their thoughts, or the security of their home countries' campuses - not in international symposia or western academic campuses.

It would thus have to admit that it is not "science" in the modern academic sense of the word of hard or natural science. Nor it is necessary to call it "pseudoscience". It simply is a paradigm of knowledge , or better, an epistemology (ie, a set of knowledge-defining and knowledge-ordering principles).

Attempting to express religious beliefs and scientific knowledge in terms of each other, and reconcile both in a coherent body of knowledge also leads to such endeavours as reasoned apologetics, eg for ritual and other things, much like the ancient practice of "kalam", but hopefully i ways that are a lot more careful, and knowledgeable.












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control theory not good for social theory

12.I.1430

Elements of control theory are often tempting as metaphors in the context of social organization. But treating such analogies as readily mappable to the social subject is a mistake.

As an example , here's an ostensible pearl of wisdom that : "A first-order control mechanism is any mechanism that is controlled by direct motion in a single direction. Similarly, in social theory, a single direct action producing a social change is a first-order control system." (wikipedia) .

This example in itself is innocuous enough. But just a question why would such a taxonomy be useful to social scientists? Why try to be social engineers? Haven't they all watched Adam Curtis' movies? By this question I mean, haven't they learned the disasterous effects of treating society as a machine (it's not) and making atrocious assumptions about human motivation?

tirade segment: haven't the bolsheviks miscalculated human motivation? didn't Hitler miscalculate the anglosaxons' motivations? Weren't both the cold war and the economic restructuring of the post-revolutionary quarter century a result of a very paranoid and a most cynical interpretation of history and economics?

I cite the Adam Curtis movies because they readily convey how a lot of the international politics (eg, the cold war) of the past half-century have evolved out of attempts at mathematical modeling stemming from game theorists who played games called "fuck you buddy", that sought to highlight the utility of betrayal and mistrust. I was left with the impression that such theory encoded the personal paranoia of its authors - particularly after watching John Nash and other supporters admitting as much !

Likewise it seems economic theory is at best based on stupid assumptions. But it's useless to debate them because they are discredited by the practitioners of those theories. For instance, they seem to take natural self-regulation as a guiding principle for the market and "the invisible hand". Yet in practice, the choir and agressive imposers of the theory's policy implications have been practicing selective protectionism (selecting that which protects their voters' interests), anti-labor violence, tying aid to "freer" markets, and interest rate manipulation all along. This is to say nothing of chronic and endemic cheating on the balance sheets by all the biggest players - as the past nine years have repeatedly shown us.

So we could criticize the notion of self-regulation, that it is not so instantaneous. Self-regulation is a long winded process, taking much longer in nature than the flashing intervals of market cycles. But it would be useless.

Another fact that undermines economic theory is its acceptance of the banking model of monetary supply as a given. Nonetheless, it should not be a given. it is a swindle. and should be thoroughly replaced with someone reflecting true value, and given the sovereignty of the state not the investor.

So when I see the terminology of control theory being applied so cavalierly and needlessly in social science, I worry. Because this translates into blind and ruthless policies under which millions get crushed figuratively or literally.


P.S.

Disclaimer: i've written before about social organization as well as information transfer, not in engineering terms, but in a formal framework. This was within the computational context of artificial multi-agent systems.

The idea was to apply the obvious social analogies for the sake of designing interesting schemes of social organization for artificial agents, in the vein of bio-mimetics. Not the other way around.

The study of information transfer has for its intent only the study of human communication, and not the control or tailoring of communication.

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life imitating art

I recall the real life images that seem to have provided the direct inspiration to some of herge's cases.

But here is an example of something that seems to take after his art,




The pictures show a research submarine drone and its designer. Details can be found here.

For images showing where some of Hergé's cases imitated life, we have,

"Hergé sous influence !"



and from the excellent site À la découverte de Tintin,

"Le case German Research in World War II"




A picture very similar to the Karaboudjan, here,

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The Magdeburg hemispheres: Guericke thermodynamics and the history of flight

 

One of the episodes in the history of flight involves two aeronef designs that trace their inspiration to an experiment that may or may not have contributed a bit to the development of the ideal gas laws by Boyle and Hooke, which themselves led to the development of the first steam engine. In effect, the little episode , fruitless in the history of the development of flight, shows links with other episodes in the history of science and technology.

The designs in question concern first a 1709 airship proposal by a portuguese scientist named de Gusmao whose designs for aero lift involved the exploitation of lighter than air volumes that would carry the ship up. He was renouned for making a model balloon fly up to the roof. His airship design involved an apparatus or grid to to heat the air underneath a canopy that covered the airship, a conceptual predecessor of the hot air balloons. He was encouraged in his design efforts by another lighter-than-air idea, 37 years older at his time, and unfortunately impractical , by a Fransisco di Terzi, who imagined an airship relying for its buoyance on thin copper vacuum spheres .

Terzi's idea of the vacuum spheres , and the calculation of the relative weights of the air-less copper spheres and their equivalent in air, was in fact, despite the oversight quite brilliant and sensical. Yet it derives from another vacuum sphere , one that was developed twenty years earlier.
That sphere, as it turns out, was a much more famous sphere, that in fact was not a sphere but consisted of two hemispheres named after the town where they were conceived , Magdeburg.

The two hemispheres of copper , about a foot in diameter, were made in 1650 and demonstrated repeatedly at royal courts through the following dozen years by the german scientist and public servant, Otto von Guericke who set out to demonstrate the power of the pressure of gazes like the air and fluids like the atmosphere. In so doing, he wanted to disprove a long held notion , originating with Aristotle, on the reason why solids were held together so tightly , what made substance, utterly divisible into dust particles, be able to hold itself.

Artistotle's proposition stipulated that nature abhors a vacuum, and in the same way , earth is attracted downward and fire is attracted upward, there was a natural disposition to fill in in gaps in space causing matter to condensed in its solid forms. This interpretation of his thus came to be known , by Guericke's time as "horror vacui".

Guericke seemed to believe that it was rather the pressure of the air , a force of our atmosphere that held solids together. An erroneous notion that can be more than forgiven for the ingenuity with which he set out to prove it.

The hemispheres were to be brought and held firmly together after covering their rims with a layer of grease or naphta oil. They were then to be emptied of their air content by means of an air pump von Guericke had developed specifically for the experiment. Once devoid of air, the hemispheres became so tightly held together that no amount of available force could do the work of displacing them apart. To demonstrate this fact each hemisphere was tied to a team of horses , both facing opposite directions. Both teams would then be made to pull the hemispheres in opposite directions, but no matter how hard the horses pulled the hemispheres held tightly. the enormous force of atmosphere pressure on the vacuum inside the sphere held its hemispheres together.

In setting up this experiment Guericke demonstrates some fine details.

- The experiment was a success and was even popular , making it part of popular knowledge not just insular recondite science.

- The experiment's apparatus was the world's first artificially (human) made vacuum enclosure. This particular activity, creating a vacuum , is very important to the advancement of modern chemistry, and later electronics.

- The design of the air pump to create the vacuum went on to contribute to Robert Hooke and Robert Boyle's work and consequently to the prolegomena of modern chemistry and thermodynamics that they both have laid down. Other chemistry researchers followed Boyle and Hooke's example and made use of Guericke's pumps to enable to examine chemical propertie and reactions in a vacuum, greatly aiding the advancement of chemical science. Vacuum flasks and tubes later carried electrical research through the invention of incandescent and fluorescent light , the radiotelegraph and the radio , and the vacuum tubes of the television and the computer.

The graph below happens to capture some of the threads of this short historical episode,




but moreover it looks like a useful tool for rendering (and variously compressing, analyzing visualizing and summmarizing text such as those from which the information in this note was gathered.

The texts used were largely en.wikipedia articles, plus the illustr. ...


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