(Kindly let me know if my math does not tally below. I tried to check and recheck it, but…)
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Q: When was 120 minutes ago from now?
A: It was two hours ago.
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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?
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*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).
The concept of ‘nationality’ is myth institutionalized. Culture-plus.
Culture is a myth existing in the subtleties of our everyday lives. Known by everyone, taught by everyone; and, yet it remains a bit invisible to those very ones who know and teach it. Nationality is is an institutionalized mythological narrative taught publicly, in a systematic fashion. Simple things like reciting a pledge of allegiance at the start of every school day.
Three types of nations may be distinguished. Old, natural nations like Britain, France, Spain, etc. New nations that emulated the nationalistic practices of others; and, the third kind are forced into nationhood by virtue of being ex-colonial states granted independence. Forced nations are those nations founded on the assumption that immemorial antiquity can be constructed, taught, and ultimately naturalized into a population.
“The soil of America absolutely rejected a territorial aristocracy.” The inhabitants “hardly know one another, and each man is ignorant of his nearest neighbor’s history…Wealth circulates with incredible rapidity, and experience shows that two successive generations seldom enjoy its favors.”
Alexis de Tocqueville (French diplomat; b. 1805 – 1859)
The circulation of wealth is not a condition common to forced nations. Americans enjoyed a bourgeois liberty, “not the aristocratic freedom of their motherland, but a middle-class and democratic freedom.”
They had learned to combine democracy and liberty as the French had not. The French had to suffer a democratic revolution. Americans did not and thus “were born equal instead of becoming so.” This ignores the slave-holding practices of America at that time, but the idea is that your bloodline does not determine your life. There was no landed gentry or fiefdoms in America.
There is an absence of an American socialist or militant-working class tradition. The white immigrants could pursue their middle-class goals freely, unencumbered by a feudal tradition. Social homogeneity kept most Americans from systematically thinking about class differences. The American political culture lacked the European social categories which may be necessary to allow for the expression of such antagonism.
Hartz even argues that the failure of the bourgeois to develop class consciousness left American workers ideologically crippled. Because, there were no feudal institutions to attack, U.S. liberals, unlike European liberals, could entirely reject the idea of powerful government. America did not have it as a weapon because they never had to use against an older order.
*The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution; Louis Hartz, 1955.
Widespread economic wealth had a major role in sustaining the liberal character of U.S. political thought. Social pluralism and separation of residence from workplace can be attributed, at least in part, to the openness and fluidity of a liberal society.
The American liberal tradition has been very effective in limiting U.S. political development because ideas and behaviors, words and deeds, have mutually constrained one another.
The New England Calvinist Jeremiad made a contribution to the dominance of a liberal consensus. It pointed out New England’s and, later, America’s failings: the sins of the people. The more often the preachers named the nation’s sins and punishment, the more strongly they asserted that the nation’s special mission as “god’s chosen instruments.” This mission was essentially individualist and capitalistic.
“New England evolved into a middle-class culture…a commercially-oriented economy…sustained by the prospect of personal advancement.”
The American Jeremiad; Sacvan Bercovitch, 1978.
Here is a cultural foundation for the American social order (the ‘spiritual cohesion’ that comes only from a ‘social ideal’) which such a purely secular concern with ‘personal aggrandizement’ could not provide.
Through the Jeremiad, Americans came to see a special place for their country in the world, as well as envision it having a sacred history. As a result, the Puritan rhetoric of social criticism re-affirmed a belief in the legitimacy of the American regime by promising to purge it of its defects.
Gellner’s discussion of nationalism revolves around the transition from Agrarian to Industrial. Industrial civilization is based on the explosion of economic/scientific growth rather than stable technology. Population growth in the industrialized world is no longer Malthusian.
The two principles of political legitimacy in industrialized societies are 1) economic growth and 2) nationalism. Regimes are acceptable if they can, over a period, engender growth, if not they lost authority.
We are egalitarian because we are mobile (as a society); we are not mobile because we are egalitarian. Mobility is imposed on us by social circumstance. Growth entails innovations and new technologies, creating and relinquishing jobs. Growth societies cannot have a stable occupational structure. These societies acquiesce members by giving confident, justified expectations of moral improvements as opposed to inciting terror or superstition. Everyone climbs the ladder, gets a promotion.
The modern occupational structure professes to be egalitarian, within a upwardly mobile professional sphere. Within that sphere, however, we are to be anonymous, per se. Leave your personal problems at home, right?
The person you are at work must censor and behave differently than the person you are at home. Well, at least for many of this surely remains true. Remove a subsistence economy and you stop people from procuring their own foods and goods. Replace that economy with a cash economy and now people hold jobs to be paid a wage that they may use to purchase the things they need. This is the counter-intuitive, semantic nature of work in industrial societies.
All this reduces to the capacity to articulate and/or comprehend context-free messages. This is the metaphorical antithesis of what are brain does, particularly when interpreting meaning from words. Context provides meaning. Personal context can become a moot point in modern, professional environments as the implication is that professionalism is not the same as authenticity. Professionalism involves carrying oneself in a posture: posturing. Authenticity is the posture you take when no one is looking. Crossing your legs at work versus going spread-eagle on the couch to get comfy.
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.
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.
An abstraction is made when something not capable of existing in isolation is thought of as in an isolated state. Consciousness is an abstraction. The concrete can be only the synthetic totality of which consciousness, like the phenomenon, constitutes only moments. Effecting a phenomenological reduction will not succeed in restoring the concrete (of consciousness) by the summation or organization of the elements which we abstracted from it. The relation of the regions of being is an original emergence and is a part of the very structure of these beings. “Is there any conduct which can reveal to me the relation of man with the world?”
We have established a parallelism between the types of conduct man adopts in the face of Being & Non-Being. We’re tempted to consider Being & Non-Being as two complimentary components of the real -like dark and light. Two contemporary notions which would somehow be united in the production of existents and which it would be useless to consider in isolation. Pure Being & pure Non-Being would be two abstractions which could be reunited only on the basis of concrete realities~There is nothing in heaven or on Earth which does not contain in itself Being & Non-Being,
Things in general “are”, but their being consists in manifesting their essence. Being passes into essence. One can express this by saying, ‘Being presupposes essence.’
Being is prior to nothingness and establishes the ground for it. Being has a logical precedence over nothingness and it is from Being that Nothingness derives its efficacy. Nothingness haunts Being. Nothingness can have only a borrowed existence. Non-Being exists only on the surface of Being.
*this is just Sartre’s opinion, yo. Dissent? Thoughts?
Classical mechanics uses space and time but never questions itself about time, space, or motion. And, Social Sciences do not question themselves about man. We cannot take it for granted that experience will give us the facts of a group or that anthropology will bind these facts by means of objectivity, strictly defined relations, if we want to access “human reality.”
The problem is our research is aimed at constituting laws and at bringing to light functional relations/processes.
By indirect knowledge, I mean the result of reflection on existence. It is indirect in this sense-that it is presupposed by all the concepts of anthropology without being itself made the object of concepts.
An abstraction is made when something not capable of existing in isolation is thought of as in an isolated state.
Consciousness is an abstraction.
The concrete can be only the synthetic totality of which consciousness, like the phenomenon, constitutes only moments. Effecting a phenomenological reduction will not succeed in restoring the concrete (of consciousness) by the summation or organization of the elements which we abstracted from it. The relation of the regions of being is an original emergence and is a part of the very structure of the beings.
“Is there any conduct which can reveal to me the relation not man with the world?”
We have established a Parallelism between the types of conduct man adopts in the face of Being and Non-Being. We’re tempted to consider being and non-being as two complementary components of the real: like dark and light.
Two contemporary notions which would somehow be united in the production of existents and which it would be useless to consider in isolation. Pure being and pure non-being would be two abstractions which could be reunited only on the basis of concrete realities.
There is nothing in heaven or on earth which does not contain in itself Being and Nothingness.
system: combination of components can form a more complex organization, that can be termed a system. E.g. of biological systems: cells > organism > ecosystem. To understand how biological systems work, it is not enough to have a complete “parts” list.
emergent properties of systems: with each upward step in the hierarchy of biological order, novel proerties emerge that are not present in the level just below. They are due to the arrangement and interaction of parts as complexity increases. E.g. thoughts, memories are emergent properties of a complex network of nerve cells.
reductionism
reducing complex systems to simpler components that are manageable to study (horseapples: I say) The dillema of understanding biological breaks down thusly:
1. We cannot fully explain a higher level of order by breaking it down into its parts
2. Something as complex as organisms and /or cells cannot be analyzed without observing them take their own selves apart.
He said, “Slick-you don’t hafta put effing limitations on the goddamn variables in a dynamic system! Like, the more chaotic the individual parts of a dynamic system are, then the more effing potentialities or organizational principles may be exploited and checked out for utility and efficiency. Why lock in and hoover when the shit will regulate itself eventually? Hmm? Why is it that everyone effing assumes that organic self-organization is so uncommon? … Well, you can still call it uncommon, I suppose, like…shit, like uh, as uncommon as a not great hand of poker.”
She said, “You mean if liberty is completely maximized, despite the appearance of chaos, society will spontaneously organize itself in a sustainable or meaningful way?”
“Yeah.”
“And the odds of this are as likely as getting dealt a losing poker hand- likely to occur more often than not?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said, “the only precondition is that the individual parts all impact each other’s functioning.”
Euclid was the dude who gave us (Euclidean) geometry.
He included the postulate below. Given any straight line and a point not on it, there “exists one and only one straight line which passes” through that point and never never intersects the first line, no matter how far they are extended.
Well, this was later replaced with the assumption that more than one parallel can be drawn to a given line through a given point. One could also make the assumption no parallels can be drawn thusly. This led to a new type of geometry.
It was after this shift in thought that mathematics was recognized to be much more abstract than traditionally supposed:
Because math statements can be construed in principle to be about anything, rather than some inherently circumscribed set of objects or traits of objects.
Because the validity of math statements is grounded in the structure of statements rather than in the nature of a particular subject matter.
Because any special meaning that may be associated with the terms in the postulates plays no essential role in deriving the theorems.
*Clumsily articulated from readings by Douglas Hofstadter as well as Roger Penrose
A Division of Grim Shadowy Form
A Limited Liability Company
[GSF,LLC]
__________________________________________
“No, Meg, don’t hope it was a dream. I don’t understand it anymore than you do. But one thing I have learned is that you don’t have to understand things for them to be…..”
The art of prose exists because the words are not objects but designations for objects.
Prose is an attitude of mind.
Beauty hides in a book; It acts by persuasion like the charm of a voice or a face. It does not coerce; it inclines a person without his suspecting it, and he thinks that he is yielding to arguments when he is really being solicited by a charm he does not see.
The dead are there [in the library]; The only thing they have done is write. They’ve long since been washed clean of the sin of living and their lives are known only through books which other dead men have written about them.
In one sense, it is a possession; The reader lends himself to the dead in order that they might come back to life.
In another sense, it is contact with the beyond.
Literature and Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre
…………gather round the children and elders, as I will tell a tale of Once, Back When We All Lived In The Forest…….
The tale is nothing, if not novel and authentic. I readily admit the probable likelihood of disputes issuing forth once I’ve told my unheard tale.
You’ll say that you have heard this one from somewhere before.
The sensation persuading you to disbelieve me is itself the evidence that I advance in support of the validity of the two assertions I aver of my tale-it is untold and authentic.
For, do you not know that all tales of, Once, When We All Lived In The Forest, are the same tale being told anew in novel forms. The stories endure existence because we never stop wanting to hear them. We never stop wanting to hear them because we’ve always heard them. But, it is not in the way we hear phones ring, cars alarm,or birds chirp.
The sound of a story is the sound of one’s own pulse. Can you really conceive of the sound that your pulse makes? I experience my pulse, more than I hear it-although it certainly is audible. After physical exertion, I hear it loudly, sometimes, even ringing in my ears until my heartbeat begins to still. Fear, complete quiet, and stillness make my own pulse sound the loudest.
The sound of my pulse goes unnoticed by my awareness most of the time. I presume this results from my awareness having been exposed to the constant, continuing sound of my pulse during every single moment of my existence.
Eventually, my brain said, “Enough! Let’s just tune that one out. We’ve got more stimuli in this very second than the sense facilities of this meat bag could ever experience, let just go ahead and not waste energy on perceiving the pulse. That sound will continue until the meat bag dies. I know avoiding death is sort of what my job here is all about, but we don’t need to monitor for the sound of the pulse. With pulse, I’m willing to go on the honor system. Besides, if I always listen for the pulse and the pulse is always audible until ceasing at death, I will never hear it cease because its cessation is the end of my ability to hear. “
So it is with story. The ‘me,”myself,’ and, ‘I’ (used when a self references its own self hood) exist because humans have story as a sense organ. The organ differentiates humans from other mammals.
The story organ creates a self out of the development of a homo sapien. What human can be said to not have self-hood?
What is a self and how is it by which some organisms and not others come to possess self hood? Is it possible to possess self hood but have no awareness of your own self?
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WrittenCasey 