04 February 2009

self-similarity in geography

09.iI.1430


There is an unmistakable degree of self similarity where every sea, every subcontinental outcrop or indentation finds its form repeated in relative miniature somewhere inside and or near it, and someimes also far from it as if reflected about some axis.

And with the formal replica in miniature there are also political replicas to the regionally larger political or ethnolinguistic structure.

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03 February 2009

P مـ م Ρόδος Ruːdes عامود rod

12.I.1430


Rhodes was known for its colossus which to be truly colossal and on a harbor for the far flung to see, it must have stood on a pillar.

In taking the semitics/phonoecian's `amoud, they mapped the glyph due to simil of form to P the letter Rho, and mistook the with a R phoneme,

Remaining text.
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chinoiserie dept: reproducing form

08.iI.1430


I'm not much fond of sculpture but this wood sculpture is really, verily vow!


("Bodhisattva Guanyin; 11th/12th century A.D.; Polychromed Wood; Chinese; Shanxi Province; Liao Dynasty (907-1125)" , north song 960–1127 or jin dynasty )
src: click photograph

there are of course equivalent specimens in the history of european sculpture , even equally with wood which must demand more delicate subtleties, but the age range of the statue, and moreover the choice of this pose / posture , and for a buddha, make it particularly interesting.

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02 February 2009

do the locomotion: everybodys doin a brand new dance now

07.iI.1430



Animal locomotion and biomimetics have much to offer in the problems of automobility on earth off it and outside it without recourse to combustion (the generation of huge inefficient mechanical change just to move the tiny weasel cabinet, vessel or ve-hicle).

There are ways to circumvent the cap on efficiency that most 19th century physicists (starting w/ Carnot) theorized for thermodynamics. Because living organisms do not obey that efficiency limit! (though we humans are so inefficient we've been making up for all the efficiency of nearly all life of the past 4.5 beellion years for the past 250 years :( ) In fact, Mrrs. animals (or rather , their Mr. design) turn the whole stupid concept of a combustion engine on its head.

So here is a big bird to Mrrs. Watt, Carnot, Daimler, Benz and Diesel. Because it is actually they , who turned the natural concept of a heat engine on its head - albeit unwittingly and blamelessly because they only had the macroscopic world of farm barns and then garages to look at.

Heat engine

Nearly all animal organisms have ways to propel themselves. It is only one of the use s of their means of generating and storing energy and converting it to both work and heat. This propulsion involves combustion too (apparently no way to ever get rid of it) but it is ingeniously and cleanly bRroken dOwn at the VeRy mOleCuLlaRRr levvell. (actually macromolecular)

That aside there are also promising routes electromagnetically (think a very advanced maglev train with one End of the rail turned n degrees up from the horizontal, which somebody proposed about a decade ago). And combinations thereof) and by duly treating the darned celestial space as the medium that it is. This is all barring some future exploitations of other properties of matter other than just their frivking high energies.

The escape problem

Some of the smallest insects there are (though i'm not sure where they draw the line) jump really high using the sort of spring action by hind legs. It is similar to the way cats or kangaroo propell themselves too , those paddle like hinds. (mmmm hinds)

In any case it beats my conception so far to propel a ve-hicle to orbit without using combustion; namely set the ve-hicle next to the vertical drop of an elevation, a hill, a short falaise or plateau from the top of which we'd assemble a huge amount of mass and then drop it onto one end of a seesaw to propell the "rocket" sitting on the other end of the seesaw.

- more (more?) -

The ideal is to build birds large enough to carry/house (for they can be made separable) the desired payloads , that would flap and glide in widening circles all the way through the atmosphere , then when the air is too rare for flapping to be effective it can then resort to assistance from a jet engine onto orbit, requiring far less fuel than the stupid idea of accelerating to escape velocity all the way from the ground. I think we've seen the renunciation of that approach in some of the desins of the partlyt saudi-financed X Prize.

The idea of transport in zoo-morphic machines is familiar to all of us in many works of science-fiction literature, art, comics and motion pictures.


Similar techniques should be employed if the interstellar medium - electromagnetic radiation and fields and particle jet streams in addition to grav fields in the dense ley populated solar system - permits itself to be exploited like atmospheric air.

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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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01 February 2009

Very quick solutions to the coming social metamorphosis

5.iI.1430


1- Cancel all debt computed due to compound and simple interest.
2- Enforce food self-sufficiency for every nation that can do so.



1- Cancel all debt computed due to compound and simple interest.
In practice what people will end up doing is whole sale cancellations of debt which is not advisable or necessary - but then again people will be acting out of panic in reactionary ways.

- more -

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31 January 2009

Etymo note: cube cubus kybos cubit كعب مكعب

04.iI.1430


cube cubus κύβος (dice) cubit كعب مكعب


and obviously الكعبة .
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30 January 2009

Pulling all the stops

04.Ii.1430


I guess this is where that phrase "pull all the stops" comes from.





The stops of an organ come in the form of pullable knobs or switch tabs. Their function is to determine the timbre or waveform of the sound by opening and closing some of the pipes (the rank) that sound the different overtones (harmonic series components) of each note.

But this, the brontosaurus of instruments, epitomized the aspiration and expression of fine control of sound. I guess it represented the state of the art in sound synthesis until the electric synthesis (starting with for example the electric Hammonds since 1930s).


a Hammond organ tone wheel and an electromagnetic pickup

Aside from all its wonders it was also emblematic of an excess of self-indulgence resource and labor abuse. The organ pictured above, with 500 stops, is a good example. it is not even the organ of a renowned church that was played by famous concert players. it is the organ in some marine academy in terroristan. I can imagine a cadet's rousing polyphonies in which he pulls all the stops for his class mates just before they take off to sow with brimstone and fire further unsustainable expressions of power and pomp on far away lands.



And yet there are much much larger behemoths. In fact the largest and most complex organs ever built - as if to highlight the inescapable element of excess - were built , as i guessed, in terroristan.


the console of the largest organ "ever built"
which is in , ahem, Jersey; New Jersey that is - apparently commissioned by one the Sopranos! :) jest kidding. It was , as it is now defunct, called the Boardwalk Hall Auditorium organ by Midmer-Losh Organ Company


The largest still-functioning organ in the world today, is , also , the Wanamaker at Macy's, Philadelphia. Second largest "built yet".

They have to make one wonder why all the complexity of hundreds of and hundreds of stops to change timbral character of the sounds? Particularly that the most enthusiastic builders were hardly brimming with musical pedigree; unless we dismiss these instances as symptoms of american (terroristani) exceptionalism that at some point people used to call Americana.

Who the hell dedicates so much labour (organ makers of the new world apparently) for such complex fine'd control and how much do they command in price from their boisterous buyers hailing from churches with worshippers' donations, or other self-important institutions of more secular nature.

David Yearsley writes of the trials of the destitute wind billowers that powered the creative crusades of J-S Bach and countless other composers and organists of high pretensions, and who received atrociously low wages for their trouble. (Incidentally Yearsley has been endeavouring to relate in a series of online essays interesting twists in the turbulent history of classical music, and a bit of jazz).

Phew, thank God for the electronics revolution, though with truly continuous and infinitesimal control, people stopped thinking like Bach , or Handel , or even like Miles Davis or the narratives of modern pop. Instead , the musicians gave us electronica. Yep thank God for electronics.

While Hammond seems to have addressed a need for cheaper organs by exploiting electromagnetism, in the climate of downturn of the Great Depression, today's modern synthing evolutionary steps have been about 20-30 years in time for another wide economic downturn. Another round of reigning in the excesses of the - hopefully - passing age.

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29 January 2009

isn't the debt fictitious?

03.II.1430


According to some like paul craig roberts, the amount of debt associated with the infamous "troubled assets" may be in the tens of trillions (t-hens of trrreeeellions). How could that be?

Could it be that the debt exceeds "all the money in the world?" If so then how come? Why is that debt so large? After the stupid terroristanian real estate market was NOT that big ! So Where does all this debt come from?

This reminds of the absurdity of the cold war reality that stockpiles were sufficient to destroy the earth several times over.

In reality the debt must come from the combined projected earnings coming from / in the form of INTEREST on the original "bad" loans.

All this debt, like most of the money that circulated the world due to the monstrosity of fractional reserve lending by banks, for hundreds of years, is fiction.

It is the price of money. Something that is set arbitrarily at the pleasure of the lenders.

The accumulation of debt must have been growing for a while with the rate approaching exponential growth. Shouldn't this in theory lead to an eventual insurmountable and huge shortage of redeemed value in a sort of catastrophic "final run"? I'm not really sure, but if i understand correctly it's part of central banks' jobs to prevent this from happening - but this is another story.

For this case, the case of the bad debts, the packaging as "investment" of so much "value" that was to come from INTEREST payments on bad debts is actually fictitous as investment as a debt.

This huge amount of "troubled assets" in the tens of trillions which is actually calculated interest should to be fair be null.

And the investment (a sickening euphemism for generation of value out of charging interest on debt) is thereby equally fictious and null and void.

So why don't governments wise up and declare all those obviously fictitious "assets" null and void once and for all?

As an indication of just how fictitious these "assets", these interests, are , imagine instead of us declaring them null and void they just suddenly disappear?

Is anything going to go missing from the world? Nothing would be amiss. Because all that "value" those assets are nothing but thin air. Hot air, chewing of mouths, and dishonest ink on paper.

Not even the debts themselves would disappear.

For erasing those unlawful and fictitious interests need not address the original real estate loans at all.

Roberts in his article cited earlier enumerates a few of the insanities in terroristani behavior today. But they pale when compared to the insanity of continuing to pretend that those interests hold any intinsic value. Sure the interests are legal, in that they are codified into common law, but this does not mean those laws are sound.

It is past time to wipe those, wipe interest, wipe fractional reserve lending , wipe the fictional fiat credit standard of money; it is past time to wipe the whole slate of centuries of fraud clean.

.
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28 January 2009

etymo note: @ الربع

02.Ii.1430


The @ symbol comes via portuguese "arroba," from the arabic word "Al-rub`" pronounced Ar-rub` (=quarter,one fourth). The glyph has been used in iberian practice since the 18th cent. to denote the much older spanish unit of measure (11th cent.).

Known in English as the @ sign, it is called in French "L'arobase "
and equivalently: arrobase, arrobe, arobas, arrobas or "a commercial"

According to http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/@ The name originates from the Portuguese unit of weight and capacity measure.

Just to save time I quote:

"Ce terme vient de l'arabe الربع (ar-rubʿ, « le quart », un quart de quintal, soit 25 livres, poids équivalent à 11,502 kg – 12,5 kg en Aragon)."


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object graph update

02.iI.1430


cramming more stuff in.




excludes properties and morphisms nodes.
if iamge is badley resized try this link
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note on theorem graphs

02.iI.1430


note on theorem graphs. relating toprevious ones

* As a possible ideal: theorem graph at the deepest zoom level should include the complete set of cross references in the body of science (ie scientific literature) - though this is also a property of historical math graphs.
* thus providing on demand sequence/chain paths of book/paper citations, as well as paths of sequences of theorems
* apologetics:
* is this not already available in existing literature/existing forms, such as journal indices, encyclopedias, and books?
* yes but the graph differs in a few things
* we strip all the descriptive text and other extraneous text and information
* the whole is presented graphically (and strucurally for machines and report designs)
* the connections are made explicit and more inclusive and wide ranging than in texts enabling quick cross topic navigation by eye rather than by following links or flipping pages
* though a counteragrument is that one would still have to pan and zoom to move among paths of the graph

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social fields?

02.II.1430


* we imagine a human society where each individual is a generating a field, or is the gauge particle of a field.


* we imagine a human society where each individual is a generating a field, or is the gauge particle of a field
* or that every individ is endowed with different kinds of charges.
* or rather that every individ is both a gauge particle generating a field, and endowed with different charges , "observables that interact with other particles field
* conjecture: the individuals are each unique , unlike the particles families in the physical metaphor or source of the analog we're trying to construct
* counterconjecture: not unlike physical particles, individs represent instances of different classes / families of particles (having nothing to do necessarilty with biological kinship)
* each individual generates a field of influence in its neighborhood
* others are either outside the field or inside, or the field could be infinite tapring off to infinitesimality in the case of people who do not know the individual and who might subissent a residual influence that is negligible not , felt.
* those that are closer to the indvid who generates his field, have a larger charge wrt to the charge field generated by the individ than others.
* this determines their proximity or distance to him in his field - which socially translates to the group of people interacting directly with the individ.

* what kind of topological space would correspond to the set of individuals in a society?
* how connected, compact, and separable is that topological space?
* what kind as in how is it to be classified? t0, t1, t2, t2.5, t3, t3.5 , t4, t5, t6,
* hausdorff, normal, regular, tychonoff, etc.
* we note that the intersections of neighborhoods are not empty, as one clue to the type of topology of the social spc

* we let state be the open/closed / clopen sets that constitute the (local) neighborhood of each individ in the social set or space
* there may be a prblm w/ that def

* we image that transformations are changes of state for a given subset S of the spc
* if the change of state is generated from S (self-generated) ,
* the xform is an automorphism?
* equiv to action by the subset?
* if the change is generated by another subset R , it is a xform R->S or is it?
* it is not
* we cannot change a subset R to subset S , we cannot transorm people into other people
* the changes are from state(t1) to state(t2),
* thus it seems the change is from a subset to a subset hence always an automorphism
* on the other hand individs may move from one subset to another in the course of / due to a xformat ,thus
* was the xform applied to single subset ending up affecting more than just that subst or
* was the xformat applied to all the subsets that got affected?

* thus there may be two prblms w/ xformats
* in defining what is a state
* in defining what is a transformation (of what, what changes what remains the same, from what to what,automorph or not)

* motivation for social xforms:
* ideally that would be to look at em in terms of groups, the study of which properties are useful to descriptions (and verifiable sims) of the system
* but since a) i know neither what it means to organize xforms into groups , nor what the props o groups and their representations, their lie algs and their lie algebras' reps say about the system or the xformats; and b) i am in the effort to understand and know those things
* this is what the construct of the social field analogy and identifying xformats their groups vis a vis the props / observables and the system.
* wrk symmetry into that: those xforms that leaves certain props unchanged.

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24 January 2009

set the controls to the heart of sustainability

27.I.1430


Egyptian economic sector composition of agriculture (13.8%), industry (38.1%), services (48%) (2007 est.) should be tweaked to increase agro to increase local demand coverage , and to increase industry both at the expense of services.



This provides a more solid basis for the economy and should be geared to generate local demand when foreign demand recedes.

What is the problem with rectifying our situation where we're consuming twice as much as we produce (our trade deficit is nearly equal to our export volume)? Quality. We have tended to make and acquiess to shoddy products of poor quality and utility. It would reduce qlty of life even further unless oversight and enforcement are observed. But good luck. the point is not to have obscene states of the art in consumer products but to strike a balance that neither of poor standard nor wasteful.
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23 January 2009

vitamin C and chirality

26.I.1430


A couple of notes relating to nutrition and a pattern in life.

The daily recommended intake of vitamin C for adults between 20 and 60 is about 110 mg. For those such as smokers with higher exposure to oxidants, the dose should be at least 200 mg.

While an orange will have about 60 mg of vitamin C per 100 g(which is L-asorbic acid, and we'll come to the L- later), a lemon 65. Honey has the lowest amount only 0.5 mg.

It turns out that guyava has a much higher store of vitamin C, about 245 mg per 100 g.

Great economizing (unless oranges are much cheaper than guyava). Instead of having to take four oranges per day, or chewing on 2/10th of a kilo of dill leaves, a single guyava would cover more than my need of vitamin C. Joy.

Now concering the L-part, there is something very peculiar about life.

Many molecules are chiral (better yet see wp:Chirality_(chemistry)).

So is vitamine C which can be left-handed or right-handed. Other biomolecules that are chiral include amino-acids such as alanine (shown from wp) and sugars such as glucide.

The interesting thing is that living organisms select only one of the chiral orientation (L or left-handed) and not the other (D or right-handed). This is true for amino-acids sugars and other alimentary acids like vitamin C.

That is, the (D-Ascorbic acid) if administered to our body will not be assimilated into the body. Only L-Ascorbic acid enantiomer of vitamin C is accepted by the body.

Moreover there is an asymmetry in the quantity of L- vs. D- biological molecules, which some ascribe to meteor impacts that predate the appearance of life.

Whereas when made synthetically in laboratory conditions (read symmetric) the L- to D- ratio is 50/50, called a racemic mixture.


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