How big is an acre?

Interesting discussion revealing an example of the disjunction between ideas and reality: http://ask.metafilter.com/130521/How-is-acreage-measured-on-nonflat-terrain

Does exchange value have a foundation?

Market Value i read got a boost when Von Neumann amongst others took it 2 be a relative term definable by peoples choices of 1 thing over another - given a choice between things. Like my results network this runs in to problems if one attributes an actual quality 2 this difference. 1 may expect some one 2 prefer A over B and B over C but one cannot then assume they will then prefer C over A! An example of this occurs in my relationship with things. When home i use t internet and at t moment i use t library in town. Because i do this it is obvious to assume i value them and t argument would go tt i should pay 4 them. But i was thinking 2day tt had neither of them been created i wouldn't be using them and would be doing something else instead. In other words where a comparison cannot be made then no relative value can be assigned. One can only say i value there things because i use them. This does not assure tt i will use them in future or miss them if they suddenly cease 2 exist - tho human habit makes people return 2 what they know in favour of seeing things tt no longer exist as if they had never existed. But does this make things valuable? So in a free market where shopping is something people do anyway can we really use t actual exchange of goods as any evidence tt people value there things?

Resonance

Lot of what I'm heading into seems to be to do with resonance: stock markets showing up fibonacci, planets the same, earthquakes even brains and consciousness.

Schumann standing waves in Earth/Ionosphere gap have 7.83Hz frequency which is a frequency which crops up in the brain.Earth Breathing www.earthbreathing.co.uk
http://www.earthbreathing.co.uk/sr.htm

Random links from Last week...

Interesting site suggestion experimental evidence points to interaction of mind and wave-functions.Consciousness Studies www.fourmilab.ch March 21 at 4:14pm

Most balanced discussion on global warming I think I've ever seen https://www.planetseed.com/node/15200 (and Schlumberger are in the oil/gas sector)

V. nice orrery!!! http://dd.dynamicdiagrams.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/orrery_2006.swf

Earth Quake Frequency

After the Asian tsunami in 2003 had a quick look at sun-earth relationship with regards to quakes as this one happened near the solstice. There is no obvious correlation.

However getting a bit more into it after the Tohoku Earthquake I just looked at the angle between the Sun and Moon.

The chance of a quake almost doubles when the Sun-Moon angle is 70 degrees.

This is a number I am rather familiar with after all the Phi stuff earlier in the year. It is 1/5th a circle and the angle of a pentagon whose inner pentagram has sides of ratio of Phi.

The data in the graphs is upto 2003. Checking the angle of Sun and Moon on the fateful Friday it was 73 degrees!

What does come out of the brief look today is that there is no correlation between the longitude of quakes on the earth surface and the position of either sun or moon (not looked at together). There is also no correlation with distance so the recent Super-Moon is a coincidence.

Discovered that the Sun's gravity accounts for 44% of the tidal energy and the Moon 56%. The moon creates a 30cm Lithosphere bulge by itself so as it passes over, the ground rises 1/3 metre! Sun and moon combined not sure how to work it out. Is its simply 79% more i.e. a 54cm bulge - probably not linear but that is a heck of a massaging of plates!

There is certainly much to know (this is just a day spent finding code to do the planet predictions) enormous thanks to Keith for the functions:

'Astro-functions

'Keith@xylem.demon.co.uk

'http://www.xylem.demon.co.uk/kepler/

'http://www.stargazing.net/kepler/astrovba2.html

I do wonder why the scientific community always say they know nothing in this field:~ Weather forecasters have a much more complex job and at least they try.

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Actually if there is a grouping, it suggests more Earth Quakes at closest approach to sun (late Dec-early Jan at moment) + when the Moon is farthest away. The graph on left shows frequency of major earthquakes against distance of Sun (the peak would be much more obvious if the x-axis was wrapped around and started in mid scale!). The graph on right shows distance of moon on x-axis (I don't get the units of this function) and distance of Sun (again relative to mean distance = 1). There is a clear increase in frequency as the moon moves away from the Earth! Combined with the Sun this means that mid-winter and distant moon make the most likely combination for an Earthquake, combined with a Sun-Moon angle of 70 degrees which is a 1/3 Full/Empty moon.

Looking Moon phase during Earth-quakes here's an odd coincidence: when the angle (from Earth) between Moon and Sun is 70degs (peak Earthquake angle), the angle (from Moon) between Sun and Earth is 109.86 degrees. The Moon phase is then 0.33 (1/3 illuminated or 1/3 dark) using the equation: phase = (1 + Cos(angle))/2. Now the coincidence is that 0 (full moon) & 109.47 (1/3 moon) are the only two angles where the size of the projection of the Earth vector into the Sun vector (from the Moon) is the same ratio as the Phase of the Moon! ie. |Cos(angle)| = (1 + Cos(angle))/2. What significance who knows.

This is to say that the projection of the Moon-Earth Vector (e) in the Moon-Sun vector (s)

as a proportion of (e) is the same ratio as the moon phase when t=0 (fullmoon) or t=189.47 (1/3 moon) and this corresponds to a moon-sun angle from Earth of about 70 degress which statistically is by far the most likely time for earthquakes.

What possible reason?

Logic/SRH notes

All arguments are double edged. If we take an argument over the things it is meant to apply to and apply it elsewhere we will see that it has the opposite effect. For example "everything is worthless". If this argument is worthless then rather than proclaim that everything is worthless it states that it is worthless to state that everything is worthless - which is probably the source of depression itself realising the worthlessness of this kind of activity it is involved in. If it is worthless to do this then it must be worthwhile doing something else and so we contradict the assertion that everything is worthless. This is SRH.

In the notes I applied it to the statement that "Life is pointless". In which case there is no point to me spending my life coming up with statements like this.

So a negative statement defeats all sides of an argument, and a positive statement supports both sides of an argument. The note concludes that arguments make no changes.

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The world of difference is itself indivisible. Thus the world we see of many separate entities cannot be separated into a world of many separate entities and a world of one indivisible entity. There can be no difference between these because if there was then that difference would be part of the world of difference.

For the same reason a world of indivisibility cannot be indivisible from a world of indivisibility.

There is a meta level here (by SRH) that is neither divisible nor indivisible. But it is neither the same nor different from Derrida's Differance ;-)

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§ open set + neighbourhood SRH, complement s in R3 = all points not in s, p on boundary if neighbourhood contains both s & s'

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There is a contradiction in the idea of "self-replication". One can replicate "like" features so that one's child is "like" oneself, but one cannot replicate "oneself" for two identical copies are still two and not one.

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In a processes each step of the process must change the state of the machine. Each step thus exists in the state space of the machine (the set of variables that hold the computation).

Now to get a self-referential system the whole state of the machine at any one point must be present as a point within its state space and so a reference to this state must either create a change of state, or to fix the state of this system the self-reference must be recorded as a state outside the system.

For example I can work out that this sentence has forty six words while the sentence itself can't because I can step outside the system complete the sentence count the words and then change the system from outside, as indeed I am thinking of doing now. I knew that most numbers between 21 and 99 have two parts so just added 2 to the word count of the sentence. Now in true Turing style I could not count the state of the system (the sentence) before it was written because how did I know when the sentence was going to finish without actually creating the sentence first. The sentence can't work out itself if it will finish so can't decide how long it will be.

So it is only because the author can decouple from the sentence after writing that it looks self-referential. It never was able to refer to itself. What it refers to is something that I made, and I am part of that essential state system that the sentence can't exist without namely the English speaking world and actually the Universe in general.

Now for exercise can I create a state machine that runs into the problem above? It seems easy to create a machine that outputs an apparently self-referential number like one that is hard-coded to output 5 which happens to be the count of variables, or a Quine even. What has alluded me so far in the SRH quest is a definition of a machine that is "authentically" processing a self-reference and one that just happens to do so either by design or by accident. Of the set of all possible state machines obviously some will appear self-referential. My question is to find the meaning of a difference between Quines - that simply have self-referential output - and "Ruines" which have a self-referential process that has self-referential output. And what would the difference be?

Do I own the thought "There is no ownership"?

Do I own the thought "There is no ownership"? If not then do I own the thought "There is ownership". If not then do I own any of my thoughts? If not, then what part of me can I own? If there is no part of me I can't own then what can I own? No still don't agree with John Locke.

Shockingly bad program last night http://www.channel4.com/programmes/civilization-is-the-west-history ... well a question posed for almost an hour and then a single 1 line answer that the N.American system was better than the South... which is a circular argument since we say it is better because it has risen to power but then that is what we wanted to explain so no explanation ... but excellent question why did N.America rise to power rather than S.America... does anyone have an actual answer?

[cut from Facebook]

Notes on Economics

"He who pays the price calls the tune" goes the old saying. Yet for the person to pay the price to call the tune, they themselves must have sung a tune for someone else who then paid them. So everyone in a good economy thus sings other peoples tunes! This is the essence also of a good society.

Economic theory thus points to the truth that we can't sing our own tune. This is a plus for economics.

However this simple truth is under threat in Western economies because of ownership. An owner not calls the tune but they also get paid the money too (by return on their investment). So in property owning economies the saying ought to be "He who owns the piano calls the tune and gets the wage."

Now an owner like this goes out of business because they aren't playing the tune the customer wants, at least in theory. In reality the owner finds the marginal cost of playing each tune and selects those tunes that give maximum audience response for minimum skill and time of the pianist. The capitalist might also do marketing, or introduce complex pricing to confuse customers like (2 tunes for the price of 1, knowing that they are more likely to buy a drink after the first tune). Blanket advertising on media channels might be expensive but if it raises sales of particular tunes is profitable. So the audience ends up with a limited selection and reduced expectations that all benefits the owner.

Now I realise writing this that really what difference is there between a customer asking the pianist to play a tune and the owner of the piano asking him to play a tune! I guess the only difference is that the customer/pianist relationship is between someone who wants some music and someone who is skilled in producing it. One might say it is an authentic relationship. The customer dealing with the manager/capitalist/owner who then deals with the pianist is experiencing a relationship with someone who is not actually interested in the product but in the mechanics of producing it. There is no reason that this should be an inauthentic relationship (owners and pianists can both be bad people), but it is not the same type of relationship as that of the first example.

Conclusion:

1) In a free market the good principle that each person plays another persons tune is true. However when people become too powerful then they start to decide what tune other people hear and then economics breaks down.

2) The relationship between a customer and the service provider is not the same as the customer-capitalist-provider relationship and should be recognised in systems of property. It seems on this analysis that this is my central issue with Capitalism that it places authority in the hands of the owner and so doesn't respect the skills of the provider which are at root what drive a societies ability to meet its needs. As Veblen argued capitalism actually works to stifle the creativity of the working classes in order to maintain wealth in the ruling classes.

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It seems to me that Capitalism is primarily a ponzi scheme. Prices are inflated and then we borrow increasing amounts from the future to maintain the rising prices. Everyone feels wealthy and so we are encouraged to borrow more which inflates prices more. The house of cards builds higher and higher with everyone expecting to find an even more extravagant fool in the market to buy off them. Eventually the system becomes so unstable that a tiny blip and it all collapses leaving the biggest fools high and dry with relatively worthless assets. The market over corrects and it all starts again. What wealth is really created in such a system apart from simply redistribution of what exists from the stupid to the smart? How in other words can anyone support such a system?

Where is the sensation?

It occurred to me while leaning on my hand in the library and looking at my reflection in the window that I could see my hand on my head. Before that I was concentrating on the feeling of my head at my finger tips, feeling the hair and the scalp and massaging it. It then occurred to me that my mind as it was, positioned at the tips of my fingers, was very much involved with the outside of my skull. Looking at my reflection I then switched to the usual visual experience of the image on the retina that I have long considered before, and my traditional question of whether the visual space is inside or outside the brain. What was different this time as I kept my mind at my finger tips was that clearly my mind was outside my brain because I was experiencing the feeling of the hair on my scalp and that on top of my skull, and that housing my brain.

This is the question: where is the sensation?

It is not so simple as the plain visual question where all space can be reduced to looking out from some central view point. With the mind at the finger tips we are already out-there. Where when we feel something is the in-here. There are no cues of perspective to infer an in-here at all, a homunculus at the centre looking out. The fingers are far away from "me" sitting on my head in the out-there feeling "my" head... how can I feel "my" head I need to be outside "my" head to feel it, but if I am out-side it then whose is it? Very Shurangama but first time I had it so clear.

On Endless Desire

(From notes)

Either I'm not very good at it or I'm a coward, or secretly sceptical, or unlucky but whichever way I realise today more deeply that getting something is only ever a means to another end. There is no thing you can gain which will end the craving. My belief that I have been stuck with for a long time was that falling in love would give me the thing I am missing in life. This become "my muse". I realise then however that it wasn't so simple because that entailed fighting for status to be desirable and to be eligible. Now I realise that even had a fallen in love did I really think that would be the end of it and I would lie my head in my lovers lap adrift in halcyon summer meadows for the rest of eternity? Somehow my heart still believes this is how it is. Watching others (as if I needed to to see this almost a priori truth) lovers become families. Even homosexuals who one would have thought had sort not to be fertile and sort not to involve themselves with children are now gaining the rights to family. It seems a certain progression for all couples. And then there are other issues like a better home, and a better job, and then schooling for the kids , and then the desire that our children do well at school and all the desires heaped on them and then just as we think it must end, we then end up having desires for grand children and expectations for their lives and then finally we die ... to be reborn and the cycle continue.

Desire is never satisfied, yet it is Desire's power that makes us think that the next desire will end all others. This is the most ancient realisation but I am only awaking to it slowly now.

>A quote from a 1060s Hollywood film I forget went "A king can get whatever he desires, but can he chose what he desires?"

>A friend was saying what if some magic was powerful enough to influence the lottery balls. But then we realised that if such a power existed everyone would be using it so the result would be no change. What we need is not the power to make the lottery balls come up how we want them, but the power to make us want what the lottery balls will come up like! Of course even with this power the lottery would then just get split evenly and no-one would make any money either.

Sexual Power and Self-Esteem

(From notes made last year)

Low Self esteem means we don't believe we deserve happiness. This is a poison that infects us. We then seek self justification, narcissism and kingship and so we in turn subject others to suffering and torture to enforce our weak grasp of our validity. Now this creates a particular species of sexual interest. The "whore" and pornography (specifically the images of whores which is what it means) is based around the low self-esteem male seeking to reinforce their weakly based ego in expressions of power. Power being the ability to obtain resources, territory and achieve matings is thus logically what a male seeks both to obtain sex but also through sex. So the "dirty whore" is logical expression of the power-sex of weak males.

Now with females it is equally complex. Just as the weak, low status, low esteem male seeks kingship and domination so the weak female seeks enslavement so that she may experience power through it use on her (Hegel master/slave dialectic). Through her success as a slave she becomes ironically empowered.

In both cases the seeking of ecstasy in the giving to another in love (Aphrodite) , the being selfless, is confused and is expressed as Eros and the abandonment of self to another in a power relation. This is futile since neither party gains. Aphrodite by contrast is mutual respect n esteem.

I realise that power is expressed in a battle of esteem. We are aware that each person is looking both to be king and slave and it is based upon esteem and status. Attractive well turned out girls of higher class we don't expect to seek kings in unattractive scruffy males. Yet the truth is that probably they have low esteem too and are actually seeking quite low kings. It is the source of the surprise when we hear that a desirable girl debased herself is some cheap sexual act. And our response is one of measuring it through power and esteem, that were such a girl to offer themselves to us we would perceive it as a king experience which would raise our status and self-esteem.

It is surprising to me how much of sexual relations is of this type and how low in esteem most people are. Such a realisation is useful though because it teaches us not to seek esteem in the endless and fruitless struggles of Eros but to pursue the path of mutual respect and love which does not demand master/slave relations and offers freedom and growth to all partners. This is the difference between Eros and Aphrodite and indeed suggests that sexual liberation is actually a dead end and the wrong path.

Interesting to hear Germaine Greer on the radio last week in a program on Wilhelm Reich saying that the sexual revolution that she promoted had expected people to embrace sexual freedom with "humility" and responsibility and admits they were wrong in their expectations. While I agree with Wilhelm Reich that sexual awkwardness and repression leads to neurosis and destructive use of energies it's a bit primitive to say that releasing it solves the problem. Like a steam engine if the pressure is getting too high you release it to stop that energy doing harm, but really you want to use all that energy for something useful and this points to understanding orgone energy and applying it ... which is exactly what Buddhism and Hinduism for certain and probably all the various energy/spiritual teachings aim to do. It is the forgetting how to master our energies that leads all those lost generations to get sexually frustrated, and then to blame the spiritual teachings for repressing sexuality and then to realise it all in a popular revolution embracing this ignorance.

6 Nations: what is the score with 1 team playing?

Finally got around to a bit of analysis I thought of at school.

In a round robin contest where everyone plays everyone (like the 6 Nations rugby contest) it seems to me that there is a lot of information redundancy in the network e.g. in a contest of 3 teams A, B and C then after 2 games we ought to have a good idea how the third game will go. If A easily beats team B and team B easily beats team C then there is a fair chance that A will very easily beat team C. We might create a concept of "goodness" to determine that A is better than B which is better than C so A is better than C.

For notation let teams be A,B etc and games be AB, BC where the value of AC = (score of A)/(score of C) in the same game. If AB = 2 (i.e. team A scored twice as much as B) then BA = 1/AB.

On the assumption that a team has some fixed quality of "goodness" then a loop such as above of AB * BC * CA ought to give a value of 1 since if team played itself one would expect it to score as much as itself. Now this is a huge assumption that I will show is false!

In the 6 Nations there are 6 teams and so (n^2 - n)/2 possible games: that is 15 for this contest. So the results space is 15 dimensional with points representing the 15 possible (AB, AC, AD,...) network arcs or strengths. Such a network is "inconsistent" because AB * BC * CA != 1, abbreviated to ABCA = 1

A "consistent network" where all loops multiply to 1 has only n-1 dimensions, in the case of the 6 Nations that is 5. It is the reduction from 15 to 5 dimensions that creates the redundancy that I hope to exploit in predicting games.

The source of this redundancy was that concept of "goodness". The idea is that a team has a goodness that we can determine by considering that were it to play itself it would be as "good" as itself. Now the SRH claims this is an impossibility and a meaningless conception. This is all to say that a team has a self, or a substance which is invariant and determines qualities about that team. So by appealing to the concept of "goodness" of "self" we reduce the world from (n^2-n)/2 complexity to simply n-1. It is no wonder that the human mind appeals to ideas of fixed self, upon which it bases its understandings and which is only updates periodically, in preference to seeing everything as entirely new! It is also interesting that the concept of "loop" is actually the foundation of the concept of "self" here. Previously a link was seen between loops (non halting programs) and Godel statements both of which put limits of systems and raise the question of incompleteness and imply the a meta level. It is this insufficiency of "self" and impossibility of "self" founding it-self and so inherently depending and being built upon what is "non self" that the SRH seeks to prove.

The method used to solve the 6 Nations problem was to construct an expression that determined the distance from the 15 dimensional point to the 5 dimensional point in the consistent network. In a 4 node completely connected system the experimental data consists of 6 arcs and the consistent network needs to obey the loops where ABCDA=1,ABCA=1,BCDB=1,DAB/DB=1,DBCD=1. So if AB=x1,BC=x2 then CA=1/(x1 * x2) . If CD=x3 then DA = 1/(x1 * x2 * x3), and DB = 1/(x2 * x3) so the consistent network has points on

This squared distance between these is thus:

d = (AB - x1)^2 + (BC - x2)^2 + ... + (DB - 1/(x2 * x3) )^2

It occurred to me that this should all be done in log space. I've not thought it through properly yet. Update: NO because the reason for "nearest" was to change the values as little as possible from the ratios established by the data. In log() space this would mean change the scores as little as possible which is another interpretation but since I'm looking for the "goodness" of a team it is sufficient to change this value as little as possible.

This is then minimised either numerically or by partial differentiation in the 3 dimensions, setting to zero, and then solving to give the values of and the full 6 dimensions can then we calculated. These are then the values of arcs in a network where each node is a particular number. This number can then discovered and the relative "goodness" of each team can be found.

After two weekends of play in the 6 Nations it is clear that the predictions this system gives are useless. At best it is 200% out. Maybe for larger systems that 6 teams there is more interaction and so more meaning to "self" but I suspect there is something else wrong.

Teams do not play as well as themselves on each occasion. This is the flaw. Ireland played an amazing game against England on Saturday. Had they done this on all the other occasions they would have won a grandslam. They didn't. So there is no predicting team if they play like different teams on each occasion. It is all down to conditions and just because two teams seem to be the "same", and have the same name, and be the same "selves" on each occasion we should not be fooled into believing that they are the same as before. What is the sound of one hand clapping? What is the score with 1 team is playing? So we can't meaningfully separate a team from its opponents and so we can't meaningfully speak of how "good" a team is. Seems very much to support Buddha!

What shape are trees?

What shape is a tree?

The standard classical way to think about this would be to first consider what is a tree made from. We can pulp it all up into a block of wood pulp and weigh it and see how much "stuff" there is. Then we might consider how all this "stuff" was put together. We might isolate trunk, branches and twigs and show how they are stuck together end to end in a "branching" pattern - the very concept of branching here comes from familiarity with trees (an SRH problem).

But if we shift to thinking fractally we see that each part of the tree is identical with the whole tree. Cover up the rest of the tree to show just a branch and it is a copy of the whole thing. Obviously this only works with an infinite set, where removing a finite amount from the start of the set leaves the set still infinite. That is a branch of the tree really is identical (apart from scale) with the whole thing. Interesting that infinite regress is linked here with notions of self again, just as it is with paradoxes and non-halting programs. See the image to the left. So the real building blocks of the tree are actually the tree itself. And with just a simple geometric relationship defined between building blocks we can avoid having to define a substance at all and just say that it is made from itself!

Now this blows apart the SRH... but not quite.

The SRH says that things cannot be made from themselves because there is a contradiction in the idea of "substance" being built with itself. The proof is oneday supposed to show that things are always made from what they are not.

In a fractal however there is no substance either because things are made from the whole structure not a "part" or a "thing". The only substance is a relationship between parts, but parts with no substance.

It is a new way of thinking for me - that of total relationships. I need to "fix" this - it is what I'm searching for.

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The above was written in a hurry. Some more elaboration. 21/3/2011

Visualising fractals poses a problem because a definite point needs to be added to the system, or to put it another way a start needs to be made in what is an infinitely deep system. In the tree it is customary to start with a trunk somewhere (after our experience of real trees). This is really just a branch of an infinite fractal tree that could be projected into larger scales. We only focus on the smaller scales - the contracting affine transformations in an IFS.

So a fractal that really is infinite and doesn't have a start point is just a set of all the possible applications of the transformation rules, branching just like a tree but in logical space. This is a very familiar structure for example probability trees, or wave functions, mapping all the possible outcomes. But there is something unfractal about all these because they do "collapse" into discrete actualities, the substances of rendered fractals that we can sense and interact with. That said the point of this blog is the appreciation that the real structure of what we see does not lie in the inner "substance" but in the hierarchy of functions that relate the scales of a structure. That hierarchy is of the mind and not of substance and enables a thing to be made from itself which the SRH says is impossible.

However to recover the universality of the SRH it need only be pointed out that while the tree is made from copies of itself under transformation, the simple transformation rules that govern the shape of that hierarchy are not themselves built from the tree. There are three affine transformations needed to make the whole tree. These must be constructed "outside" the space in which the tree is constructed - e.g. in a symbol space for example. Thus the SRH is not really affected by this shift in understanding.

Ayn Rand

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand

A friend of considerable academic merit has decided that this woman speaks the truth. After only 5 minutes of hearing her I note that in my opinion what she speaks is about as far as one can get from the truth. I wouldn't bother to blog other than she seems to have a considerable following in America so add a drop to the ocean of rejection of her ideas. I needn't say much as this entire blog is examining the opposite poistion to that which she holds.

A single line from Jesus addresses what she believes. In response to those who say an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth Jesus reminds us that there is little merit in liking those who like us and hating those who hate us (essentially Rand's position) - any automaton and primative creature will do this. What is remarkable is those who can love both those who like them and those who hate them. I understand most people are animals and primative people, and such talk sounds like nonsense, but then so does Higher maths to grade 1 students. Just because you can't understand something doesn't make it wrong. Rand speaks to the grade 1 so I imagine this explains her following.