We have an inborn propensity to see causation. We attribute our perceptions to external causes, but some perceptual representations are internal, for instance, optical illusions.
[Consciousness] is an evolved user-illusion, a system of virtual machines.
David C. Dennett. The Evolution of Minds: from bacteria to Bach. 2017
⊙
The voice of knowledge wants to know what everything means, to interpret everything that happens in our lives.
DM Ruiz & DJ Ruiz. 2010, p124 & 13. ISBN 978-1-878424-61-7
(Kindly let me know if my math does not tally below. I tried to check and recheck it, but…)
<◇>
Q: When was 120 minutes ago from now?
A: It was two hours ago.
<◇>
When was one hundred and sixty four billion (164,000,000,000) minutes ago?
Hum, huh?
~
My illiteracy with numbers occurs at a certain threshold.
Numerical literacy*? Not my strong suit. So, I play with numbers, with what I can imagine.
For example, I can imagine a triangle, a square, a pentagram, a hexagon, a septagon, an octagon. But, I cannot imagine, or see in my mind’s eye what a 25 sided polygon would look like. I would have to try to draw it.
There is a 10,000 sided polygon, called a myriagon, according to geometry.
I will take their word for it because I cannot imagine being able to imagine what that would actually like.
~
I am not monied. The difference between one million dollars and one billion dollars? Well, sure, ‘orders of magnitude’, but I only understand that in the abstracted sense. The practical difference between such huge numbers is not immediately obvious to me. But, the news, scientific research, and governments, regularly inundate us with such large numbers.
~
Do a thought experiment with me? I wanna know:
Q1. How far could the millions of dollars, comprising a billion dollars, go?
Q2. If I had one hundred and sixty four billion dollars (as I hear someone in America truly does) and I gave away one million dollars per day, how many days before I am broke? Let’s pretend I keep my $164,000,000,000.00 in cash in a safe. That means my money is not making more money via interest, returns, dividends.
If I have one billion dollars in cash, let’s imagine it’s kept in one million dollar bills. I would have one thousand of these million dollar bills.
I could give one of the $1,000,000 bills everyday for 1,000 days before running out of money.
If there are 365 days a year, 1,000 days is about 2.75 years.
The difference between a million and a billion, practically speaking?
A1. You can give away $1,000,000.00 everyday for almost three years before exhausting $1,000,000,000.00
So, how much more than 1 billion dollars is 164 billion dollars, practically speaking?
Well, if it takes 1,000 days, of giving away 1 million dollars each day, to get rid of a billion dollars;
It would take 164 times longer to give away $164,000,000,000.00 than it would take to give away $1,000,000,000.00
1,000 x 164 = 164,000 days
164,000 days = 449 years and a few months.
If I had $164,000,000,000 ($164 billion), I could give away $1,000,000 ($1 million) everyday for 449 years.?
Fuck.
Now that I see it this way it only raises more, honest questions from an ignorant me.
How much money do people need?
And why? To what end and what do they intend?
______________
*My own numerical illiteracy was introduced to me by a slim, charming book called Innumeracy by John Allen Paulos which I found tucked away in the statistician’s, my father, bookcase.
I fell down the rabbit hole of Roger Penrose (along with Douglas Hofstadter) during my mid-twenties. I became quite intrigued by Gödel’s sentence G (Nagelhas a great book for arm chair thinkers like me).
Effie here. Hiya. Recovered notes from Parçiful are transcribed below. These are the earliest of journal entries that speak to her metaphysical confusion.
From VVönderland.
(Note: this is transcribed directly as it was found.)
She knew they were disappointed, angry perhaps, that she had not told them what they thought she knew. She was disappointed no one spoke directly to her. She was a strange bird. She shape shifted her appearance, she had odd eyes when lost in thought. She had been so sugary sweet for so long, people had come to expect it of her. Her family viewed it as unhappiness because she used to be so happy. Well, yeah, we all were once many things. She began remembering strange things. She began knowing things that were impossible for her to know. She carried memories of others that they could not remember. She overcame her disdain of silicon only to find the internet stranger than she remembered. But then again, maybe she had never used it.
We live in a pool of energy. Your consciousness is at once in your mind and all minds. Your attention is the key. You can live lives without memory if your consciousness was not there, not attuned.
She could not understand her own opinions on drug use, much less explicate a formal point of view. However, she started rattling off every synonym for sanctuary she could think of when she smoked, for a while. The idea that drug taking was a sacrifice for the sanctuary of others crossed her mind. A little self harm balancing the world of pain and sensation. Maybe that was backwards, maybe drug taking hurt other people.
Her senses might have been too highly attenuated. Too much fight or flight. She felt observed by Socratic circles. She felt like an A&R man who would get fired at any moment. She felt like she had been used again and again. She did not deny she was imperfect. She never claimed to be the perfect partner. She could turn codependent if she was not careful. She could retreat into her mind for weeks and leave her partner floundering alone.
She felt she had a special thing with words. Reading them. Sometimes, as she took notes, what she wrote read like someone else talking to her. But, what a crazy, unspeakable notion, the kind they call women crazy for asserting. She tried to speak of it to her father and sister, but it did not go well. She explained her thoughts on the magicians use of the mystics to N.
The mystics had been played, tooled with, used, and judged. Many people with mystic proclivities seemed unaware and frequently received diagnoses and medication that had little to do with an ailment. The magicians had a questionable stance regarding their right to use others. They knew this though and she had a strange intuition that she was new. Go figure. So, they were trying to level the playing field, but she could tell they were scared of her, of what she might say. Ludicrous. She would not be believed. No one would listen anyway.
She sent a single page email and was told that it was long. Made her right sad to hear. One page? If only she could figure out how to use effing memes to get the point across. What would these idiots do without their wifi?
She was over it. She had been ready to share and speak for ten years. Hopeful she could, in fact. But, now she was tired, alone. She did not care for what the world had become. She felt so old compared to her contemporaries. Their fun just was not hers. Once you read too much, there is no going back.
Empiricism is the imperialistic prerogative…at least as my mind marks it, and, it does so pseudo-empirically.
But, my concern is: if the observation of an object of inquiry actually changes the behavior of the object itself, what can be said for the metaphysical methodological underpinnings of ‘social science’?
The most basic of examples may be found in the early writings of Margaret Mead. The locals sang a different tune to her than the true song by which they lived.
DAY III: She acquired the knowledge that she got lost in her dreams.
DAY IV:
he had died;
he knew;
he saw his mom;
he took the professor as his
dad.
Together, they climbed the Mountain of Knowledge.
Together, they discovered their mistake;
Summit¹, 1. The highest part; the top; vertex. 2. The highest degree; maximum. [< L\f\. sum-mum, apex.]
– (_ << {[x ]} >> _) –
acme ; apex ; cap ; climax ; crown ; height ; peak ; pinnacle ; top ; vertex
abyss ; base ; bottom ; chasm ; deep ; depth ; gorge ; gulf ; pit ; vale ; valley
—sum’mit-al, α. –sum’-mit-less, α.
He finished his building of the edifice.
[Open-Secret x: he had long finished building his edifice.]
[Lesser-known≈Open-secret F(x): he thought he knew this already. he could and would finish when it was effing good and done. or whenever the hell he felt like it. this, as proven by dint-of diligence and curiosity, proved assumption. Not knowledge.]
Structure now structuralized, materialism became the a priori axiom. (The god’s honest truth, mister police osiffer!) ‘Things exist! We see them all about.’
“Do not be foolish, young man. The abstract is the weakness of man, our curse. For pride. For our lack of discipline over our baser instincts. Our physical body unfurled and made manifest this gift of life, permitted our superior brains to make-manifest. And, then we perceived; and Lo, it is good. This blessed perception affords our dominion over the land and the beast-
Effie here. Hi. Sorry to interrupt, but she gets flowery and the lyrical-ity requires editing. Mystæ, right? Geez. We are short on time right-exactly-now. As her younger sister, I periodically jump in and get to the point. She thinks empiricists are “as non-secular” as the religious or spiritualists. Her words there. I think she means that Academia and the Western Medical Paradigm and the Scientifics and the Technophiles, that whole lot of ’em….
Excuse me, kindly; I would be much obliged if you refrained from all or nothing/either or language, Effie. Shall we call it “a predominate number”: (or at least the loudest voices currently) of this assemblage? Regardless, science’s day of reckoning is at hand. Hear me, now and stop huffing up at that statement. I speak allegorically and yeah, science hates imprecision. I call horse-apples: science does precisely what religion does. Both systems exist non-secularly and use the same devices to reach their conclusions. Like the≈the two extremes of the trajectory of a weightless bob that is suspended by a massive (tech.) rod moving about a point.
Arabesques ’round pivotal arcs of pendulous sways.
The parable of the parabola is parabolic::The parabola of the parable is parabolic.
Non-secular science at one pole.
{_[__(.PIVOTAL.)__]_}
Non-secular religious and spiritualists at one pole.
I worked as a part-time waitress, from age 18 until age 18. I performed terribly. Back then, in Alabama, servers made $2.13 + tips.
One week my manager approached me, with pen and red binder.
“Sign here, to confirm for our tax records that you did, in fact, make at least the minimum wage. You did not declare enough of your cash tips.”
“Um, but I did not make at least minimum wage, I made less.”
“Yep, you are not good at this.”
He was correct.
Sometime later, after losing the urge to continue to pursue Academia, I worked full-time for a locally-owned, Tavern-style restaurant as a server and cocktail waitress. Not fine dining, but cloth napkins, gas burning lanterns. Upscale. The owners also owned a popular bar in the swanky part of Southside, Birmingham (The Five Points area, to be specific) where I poured occasionally. Note: Servers still only make $2.13 an hour + tips in Alabama (and many other American states). They really do work for themselves and you.
I loved my work. I took the time to learn the restaurant/service craft: Learning the menu, how to talk to people and make suggestions. The art of booze and talking booze. Maintaining equilibrium for the dinner rush / bar push for about three intense, crazy, physical hours, only to then slowly break down the establishment into a clean, organized place. The next morning, you would build it up, try to keep equillibrium, tear it down.
Taking your work home usually meant alcohol, delicious food, or another server. There was no huge deadline for the FOH staff, just closing time and the clean up.
All humans should really spend at least three months of their life as a server/waiter. Everyone. If you get hissy or huffy about the service you receive when dining out, consider the following.
Today, I pulled an old journal and found the remarks below. Enjoy
EDR = extended dining room
AOA = auditory order acknowledged
Alabama Medium = Medium Well
FOH = front of house (what and who you see as the diner)
86 = something the restaurant has on menu but does not have currently.
68 = when something that was 86’ed becomes available to diners again.
Conversations Had On a Daily Basis
Stuff Said to Me: That Pissed Me Off Enough To Scrawl
Some Stuff I Thought Worth Telling the Good People
He saw how Joseph was annealed by the fire…[and] felt the ordeal more than Joseph. P241
Sounded overwrought to me. Then I bothered (sic. concerned) myself with actually looking up
/annealed/
I was being educated on several levels. I first read the sentence such that I thought I knew more than I did. I imagined /annealed/ to be some form of a bow or a kneeling position, a kiss the ring, smell the glove. A posture taken when the situation demands you take yourself seriously. If you can imagine such a thing! Or that you undertake to do something trivial quite meticulously. For the sake of the process itself. By your choice. You take part with and in. Or, when ritual, tradition, culture, bestows us a transcendental catharsis by allowing us to take very specific actions with others undertaking them alongside, as well. A hymn sung by a choir. Suddenly, lighting a candle is holy. Yet, lighters and matches abound. Fire is easy to come by but it was not always so.
Blind spot.
Shocking how much meaning we can contain. There are so many pearls that some readers start arguing over the appraising of an irregular pearl. It is all about finding, examining, analyzing, and drawing conclusions about the relative value. Waiting to find that big money shot pearl. A yup.
“awe, more valuable. made of pearl but unique, collectors edition. Gesture, essence. and articulation.”
“Worthless. It’s shape isn’t paradigmatic of the standard pearl. Misinformed. Monstrous, devalues the other pearls to even be in the same bowl with them.”
Who let the pigs out? Who? Hoo hoo?
Too much monkey business for me. We as a species have moved on. Or did I miss the train and am now out of joint?
The Glass Bead Game: Magister Ludi. 1990. First Owl Books Edition. $18.00 USD/$24.95 Canada. That seems really inexpensive as I think back on it now. At five hundred and fifty eight total pages, it is a trek but no death march. As with any trek, though there will be days. But, then there will really be days! Am I right, a hyuck, hyuck.
The length is not the deterrent. The printing of the book intimidates. At least my copy. That is why I bought it. It looked too heavy for a book that size. A thing that is larger than physics allows but your eyes empirically cannot deny. Your brain’s rational processors will fill in the reasons that ‘you can’t trust your eyes.’
A phone booth and doctor.
A House of Leaves.
A ship ever at sail on a foreign sea, the life of the house mouse lost.
S/he loses their position in the home.
You lose something you did not know could go missing. The notion of home? An ending spoiled. Don’t let the little ones hear. Something you cannot unlearn but surely there is room for doubt and maneuver. Doubt suffers where there is little room
Something you took for granted. Because there is so much to see and so many things vying for the pleasure of your (everone’s) attention at all times. We cannot process the amount of information we physically can conceive us. We get by and brains fill in the blanks. The way you discover your new car’s blind spot.
《《 》》
Crash. Ah, hell.
《《 》》
But what was to be done? Can you judge yourself for not knowing that your vehicle is afflicted with a blind spot? Sure, but where that at? If you want me I’ll be in the bar. Speculating on some dreamy nonsense. The thing you did not see in your rearview & side mirrors (electric-adjustable, I’d wager) as you merged lanes, was, by dint of optical physics, unseeable. You cannot adjust for and account for such a variable.
The publishers did not eff around. There is a deliberate concern for both style and balance in the margin setting and lettering layout. There is room to scrawl. If you are into that sort of thing. I am! The luxury of the thick white broadband’s conjunction into right angles about the four verticies gains further dimensionality by its opposing page.
The reflecting pool in the palm. Narcissus finally went mobile. Each page appears with its predecessor and/or successor in symmetry. Consider the leaf of the sheet itself. Two page numbers and each bearing letter matricies yet on but one page. One page in the book holds two pages. Think about that. There ain’t ya’ll entertained? If that is not magic, then ya’ll doin’ it wrong. I see gods contained and present amongst the multiform streams. IHS Bacchus first. Then as Janus. Holding us in the present, pressed fast between the past and the future tense. So the text on each side of the page gives rise to leaf between your fingers as you turn the page.
Let us say, maybe, five hundred and forty pages are geometrically identical in dimension, same squares, same squares. Matrix array with its vectors contained in those critical margins. Two koi ponds reflected about the same axis of symmetry. Simpatico. The more you read, the more the very confined area with unnecessarily tiny pt. font, single spaced. Tight, trim, orderly. And you are drawn in and held fixed in that little space. Rapt. Enraptured.
And then the ratio expands. The page does not seem so small.
The biggest hinderance to the book’s popularity in America was a poor original cipher of the German language. But translating the lyrical prose of Hesse is probably like trying to translate a Japanese character into ‘the English word for it.’ You can pull it off but the English Equivalence is questionable. Americans are poorly positioned to be strong readers of such heavy, often erudite, ultimately, ironic tomes. We do not get the geographical exposure to other cultures.
Hell, we didn’t get the joke.
It fell for it too! The joke of being so dreadfully stoic that the reader would not dare think you were givin’ a ribbin.’ This is a book; An effing long one; I found all these pearls. I’m rich. Made-man. This is a book of power not jokes for blokes.
Sigh. Now, your cracking me up.
The good news is, if you do ever get the joke, it makes you smile and laugh out loud. Then shake your head. Hold on.
Although, states are arguably the same as little countries.
Heard thru headphones Aka cans (big earmuff-lookin’ ones. Obviously.), this song is and is not the same song when it is heard through speakers.
Trying to learn about sound and light these days.
Speakers. My parents had two floor standing ones that were about three feet tall.
They made sound. Headphones make sounds. My portable CD player/Cassette Tape Player (deck?)/Radio made sounds. I also took an entire battalion of d batteries if you wanted to “go mobile.”
“A boombox, in its most basic form, is composed of two or more loudspeakers, an amplifier, a radiotuner, and a cassette and/or CD player component, all housed in a single plastic or metal case with a handle for portability. Most units can be powered by AC or DC cables in addition to batteries.”
Wikipedia (per my March 01, 2019 visit) this page was last edited on 24 February 2019, at 20:24 (UTC).
Citations, huh
Hey, how they do that?
How headphones work = How speakers work = x
x = using magnetism to turn electrical energy into sound.
Speakers = loudspeakers = electric sound-making machines.
Loudspeakers attach to tiny, earbud headphones (cased inside ear muffs or earbud headphones) and make sound we hear.
Polar plots of a four-driver industrial columnar public address loudspeaker taken at six frequencies. Note how the pattern is nearly omnidirectional at low frequencies, converging to a wide fan-shaped pattern at 1 kHz, then separating into lobes and getting weaker at higher frequencies[50] (Wikipedia)
A sequence of tests is presented below that should reveal to what degree a given stereo system achieves the potential that is inherent in the 2-loudspeaker reproduction format. (See also the more recent Accuracy, spatial distortion and plausibility of the auditory scene article)
A – Pink Noise
Pink noise is a random process with a power spectrum that decreases at a 10 dB/decade or 3 dB/octave rate with increasing frequency. When measured with a 1/3rd octave analyzer, or constant Q filter bank, it has a flat frequency response. Since the critical bandwidth in hearing is approximately 1/3rd octave wide, pink noise tends to give an equal representation of all frequencies in the audio spectrum, from lows to highs. Thus it would seem to be a good auditory test signal, except that we do not have a reference for what it should sound like in an absolute sense. This limits the usefulness of pink noise to comparison tests of A versus B. Pink noise can reveal small physical differences between two sound sources, but it can be difficult to find the cause for those differences or to predict their consequences. Pink noise can drive you nuts, so be careful. Still, pink noise will point to flaws and errors in a sound system.
The tests use various 5 second combinations of L and R streams of uncorrelated pink noise. What I call Stereo here is actually fuzzy stereo and has no solid image, but is spatial like a cloud. In Mono the left and right tracks are identical. Left or Right means that there is sound only in one or the other track.
Download and save pink-alternating3.wav (12 MB). Then burn the file to a CD-R for convenient access and repetition of the 1 minute sound file.
