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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Mar 24, 2018 - 07:37am PT
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Tout droit.
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zBrown
Ice climber
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Mar 24, 2018 - 08:13am PT
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On the other side of the coin (the landing upright one) Toots and the Maytals are makers of music, they just happened to text me and ask what I was listening to right now. So the odds are more like 54-46?
[Click to View YouTube Video]
I know, a penny for my thoughts.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Mar 24, 2018 - 09:15am PT
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the Ginsberg poem is evocative of a time when my income challenged student friend would have dinner "sampling" the open food at the Berkeley CoOp (Ashby and Telegraph, now the site of a Whole Foods), a friend who no doubt could have recited the passage...
...my New England upbringing had so repressed my animal nature that I would have starved to death before following suit.
the geometric responses are such a great lead in to the Wheeler idea that it is hard to resist.
What Wheeler is asking us to do, and this will sound a lot like Largo's climber dude koan exhortations, is to not only imagine Geometry without geometry, but to reformulate it rigorously.
Imagine visual art without geometry.
Imagine describing the universe without geometry.
That was the task he set for us, he had his guesses. It is perhaps shocking to some that science has room for this sort of speculation.
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Trump
climber
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Mar 24, 2018 - 09:28am PT
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Using our minds to judge our minds is like using the Republican controlled House Intelligence Committee to judge me. If there’s any wiggle room, we’re going to judge in our favor.
Judging in our favor is exactly what 4 billion years of survival of the fittest has created our minds to do. Our minds believe things that are advantageous for us to believe, not necessarily things that are true. To me, it’s very cool, and kind of impressive, in an advantageously self-congratulatory way, that we use our mind tool that was designed to create beliefs that work to our favor in order to try to create beliefs that are true.
I just think doing so might be harder than we notice. And I think that the reason that it’s so extremely hard and disadvantageous to notice is because it’s a core component of our most important evolutionary advantage - allowing our beliefs to guide our behaviors. Cambridge Analytica seems to have noticed that we’ll believe some pretty crazy things, if believing them works to our social/tribal advantage.
But if we don’t want to just speculate about it, I invite us all to do that work and to honestly and truly and fully believe that the beliefs we hold about ourselves are just advantageous beliefs, and not true beliefs, and see for ourselves how advantageous and well adapted that belief makes us. My experience with that work is that it is decidedly disadvantageous.
Thanks for your thoughts! Gotta run - need to get back to my executive time in front of the telly, strategizing about my next advantageous lies. Those guys will believe anything!
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Mar 24, 2018 - 10:38am PT
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In so far as geometry is composition in art, it is necessity. Certain geometric relationships are intrinsic to the experience of beauty. They are realized or experienced not through measurement and analysis but by being within us as an integral part of what we are and therefore recognized intuitively as such. This is something demonstrated as early as the 5th C. BC by Socrates and his notion of the inherent nature of the Pythagorean Theorem. An idea that discredits to a large degree the notion that beauty is simply in the eye of the beholder.
Why the xy relationship is engaging, why we find it beautiful, why it is ubiquitous in life forms? Fascinating mystery.
But, measure it too carefully, analyze it too thoroughly and the opening insights of aesthetic arrest, the experience of the sublime and the beautiful become trivial and lost. I prefer paintings that aren't diagrammed.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Mar 24, 2018 - 02:36pm PT
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I'm with sycorax in this respect -- it's really, what are minds? -- not mind. Mind is the Platonic class, minds are the objects. Minds are what we have.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Mar 24, 2018 - 03:33pm PT
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Reading about pregeometry in physics is a little like reading Alice in Wonderland. I am particularly struck by Wheeler's idea of eliminating the concept of distance. Or of another's speculating on a universe of discrete points "next to one another." Or points in spacetime with rational coordinates (in a computer sense that is already true, as every number used for calculating in a finite program is rational in essence).
In mathematics, the study of metric spaces (spaces of points with a distance concept - a metric - having several of the basic properties of Euclidean distance) was generalized to topological spaces in which "distance" between "points" is more or less set aside. So I suppose the notion of a universe without distance is tenable.
I rather like the concept of a space of infinitesimals in which distance is pretty vague. But don't try to put them aside one another. And beware of infinitesimal intervals.
And I thought math was abstract.
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Mar 24, 2018 - 04:10pm PT
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The sign in the photo at the the top of this page is meant to embolden young people by blowing smoke up their asses. These kids are being used for political purposes by manipulators who have long demonstrated their proclivity to inculcate these youngsters with tendentious propaganda over and above critical, independent thinking skills.
The Millennial generation (especially the younger cohort- those now teens) due largely to low dopamine production caused by modern technology, is demonstrably the generation of Americans most susceptible to exploitation and manipulation. This is a tragedy unfolding right before our blue-screen illuminated eyes.
Whether the manipulators or the manipulated -- both are robust examples of the Dunning-Kruger effect ,as is so much of mass society at this current historical moment.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect
"The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool" (As You Like It, V. i.)[19]
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Mar 24, 2018 - 07:41pm PT
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But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God has chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty;
◄ 1 Corinthians 1:27 ►
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zBrown
Ice climber
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Mar 24, 2018 - 08:25pm PT
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Well neither God nor Abraham nor Shakespeare studied Paleo_geometry, or did they?
RestorationLab is a research plugin which aims at removing deformations undergone by rocks to get the paleo-geometry of a geological model. It is a great tool able to perform 3D restoration on both implicit and explicit geological models.
Concretely it unfolds and removes the displacement due to the faults. It solves mechanics-based problem using finite element element and Dirichlet/Neumann boundary conditions. This plugin can also decompact a model after removal of a layer using classical porosity laws.
Rock on!
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Mar 24, 2018 - 08:28pm PT
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The sign in the photo at the the top of this page . . .
What is Mind's inexorable slide into politard territory.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Mar 25, 2018 - 10:10am PT
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"The work we have presented here has helped to account for empirical findings in human spatial reorientation in children and adults—often considered puzzling—under the principle of adaptive cue combination, a proposal that has not previously been computationally specified or tested with respect to these phenomena. The model is grounded in the extensive literature on perceptual cue integration and memory for spatial location, thus suggesting that human spatial reorientation may be an instantiation of optimal behavior under uncertainty."
An adaptive cue combination model of human spatial reorientation
Yang Xu, Terry Regier, Nora S. Newcombe
Cognition 163 (2017) 56–66
http://lclab.berkeley.edu/papers/xu-et-al-reorientation-2017.pdf
The hippocampus is not a geometric module: processing environment geometry during reorientation
Jennifer E. Sutton and Nora S. Newcombe
Front Hum Neurosci. 2014; 8: 596
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4122240/
"Consider a problem often faced by travelers to new cities: despite a carefully planned trip using a city map, a traveler emerges from a subway station with no clear sense of which direction to walk to visit a famous building. The internal sense of direction crucial for forming an egocentric reference frame, or knowledge of locations in the environment relative to one’s own position, has been disrupted by the underground subway ride. Instead, the traveler is left to rely exclusively on her allocentric knowledge of the city layout, or map-like knowledge of the positions of landmarks relative to each other. If they are available and if the traveler is knowledgeable, directional cues such as the sun’s position in the sky might offer clues also. The process that is necessary at this point is called reorientation, or the process of using allocentric knowledge to recalibrate egocentric knowledge."
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Mar 26, 2018 - 10:10pm PT
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Ed: I could presume that you are questioning my intellectual honesty.
Oh, bloody hell. You poor thing.
(For academics, this is like pulling out the Race Card: “Hey, . . . he dissed me!!”
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Mar 27, 2018 - 12:03am PT
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good thing I'm not an academic!
just a simple physicist working at a national lab (for the moment).
I really do wonder what you meant, I was relaying an experience, you questioned whether I could have had that experience.
That sounded odd to me.
And while I might not write literature, I am not too bad at writing "descriptive" text, so I thought I was clear (and I'm also quite literal, so no chance of confusing metaphors, similes or parables).
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Mar 27, 2018 - 09:17am PT
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I don't agree. I think your writing needs work. Begin by eliminating all the ellipses in your posts. Be more concise and don't rely on forms of to be in verb choices.
thanks, the verb thing I've worked on, easier to fall into simple equivalences. The art there making sentences sound the way I want them to. As for ellipses, an affectation for the writing more abbreviated posts, "I would have written a shorter letter if I had the time." Sometimes, most times, I don't. But over reliance on any particular form can become annoying, and ineffective.
In my experience, good editors are essential for good writing. For me writing represents a collaborative effort.
Thanks for taking the time to respond, constructively, to my assertion that falsely characterizes my writing ability.
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Mar 27, 2018 - 11:04am PT
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The hippocampus is not a geometric module: processing environment geometry during reorientation
Coincidentally I've just read this paper on the effects of microwaves on the hippocampus of rats and then I saw Ed's post mentioning the hippo above; creating a more or less tangential context:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0031938417302706
Ward you have this view of younger generations, fueled by your pet theories on light, that frankly does not align with reality all that much.
I am interpreting this comment as an aim to draw me further out on this subject, which I might just do when I have lots more time. ( I'm headed overland to the plastic climbing place)
"...your pet theories on light"
Lol , I like that. I wish they were just merely my pet theories, and of no consequence to reality.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Mar 27, 2018 - 04:27pm PT
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Well, Ed, I think your writing is fine. But what do I know? Many years ago I submitted a paper for publication, and received a fairly prompt reviewer's report which recommended publishing the article, but with a simple caveat, that I rewrite a certain paragraph for clarity. The reviewer said, "The poor quality of this paragraph is understandable since English is a second language of the author."
I framed the letter and had in on the wall of my office for quite a few years.
;>)
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PSP also PP
Trad climber
Berkeley
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Mar 27, 2018 - 05:33pm PT
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Math being your first language!
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Mar 28, 2018 - 09:03pm PT
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Ha-ha. Ed writes just fine. One doesn't go a dive bar and preach English. Each community has its language. Perhaps one could say that maturity or wisdom comes from recognizing differences--that are at best surface features.
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