Wordpress.

I've decided to blog.  Who cares you ask? Who knows I answer,  in my reality, I myself am the most likely audience, but that is one for whom I am happy to write.  Facebook makes that difficult to achieve without self-monetization.  

If you read below, my first question, to which I invite response is whether this itself, is an early (?) sign of madness, and if so, does that make it more or less interesting.

Later.

Self definition

My first wordpress.com post.

What will it be? A window, I hope into my thoughts on the Seldon graph and the ideas embodied. It will be, I hope a window into the conversations and thoughts I have with myself.

You are invited in.

The topic, as far as I set it, will be the Econosphere. An idea, which has been festering since the onset of COVID and which I hope will soon leave the world of thought for the world of words. I hope to share and hone the words and content here as a full description emerges.

The econosphere refers to investigations undertaken during COVID starting from Schrodinger’s What Is Life? It provides a novel, mathematical model with which to discuss that and many other interesting questions.

This blog is also about making the thoughts, which are so strange, perhaps tinged with madness, public.

The model, the Seldon Graph, uses ideas from ow analysis to connect
Darwin and Marx discretely to provide a framework for multi-level sim-
ulation of economic processes. The theoretical treatment exposes questions such as what is consciousness or what is a sense, how many are there and how do they evolve?

Please let me know if it sounds fun, after all, I’m retired – fun is money,

Biden must declare war!

 War against the oil industry.  We must make ourselves perto-immune and petro-sufficient .  We need a total commitment, let us have it for war on   energy not on people.

Capitalism is the limit of free exchange as the world shrinks.

When the world was large, exchanges were rare and not based entirely on specie. Effects from religious or cultural obligation to a desire to curry favor helped to find a room or a meal in a strange town.

As the world shrank exchanges multiplied, commerce and specie spread.

Two hundred years ago fifty species shared the capitalist world, then a handful sufficed, until  one; and then, there was one money and no specie behind. A piece of a dream. 

War has returned and money will fracture and become a basket if not a thing, as Marx predicted.

Happy Mother's Day

 Only by removing capital's 'freedom of speech' can humanity recover control. The 14th amendment has made all OF US slaves to capital. No corporate spending on politics . Capital lives forever, humans do not. It will dominate if not resisted politically. We will be farmed by eternal masses of capital, generations getting smaller as capital survives in a burning world, ruling through a workforce of intelligent machines and a few survivors.

Student debt might be only the beginning

I'm beginning to think there may be a solution to MS(E&M).  Krystal and Saagar could become a force congealing from below funded by users not by capital.  It might interrupt the smooth flow  of advertising that is the Main Stream Media and their Elite rulers ( Chomsky et al). Will people pay to  hear the truth from sources they can trust.  Today seemed filled with hope.  At least, enough to push Ukraine out of my mind.

Today seemed cheerful - with Ukraine gone from the world, if only.

It begin with a segment highlighting Elon Musk, the iconic billionaire, and moving on to family wealth and it's influence.  We see the billionaire class not as an evil enemy, but as a conglomerate constructed to shield its most nefarious members from the scrutiny they require.  It is thus the monetized value of profits not reinvested in the commons from which they were extracted.  price paid by earnings on stored capital  inherited, rather than returned to the commons through legal shenanigans.  

The billionaire class - if we measure it by total wealth, is not Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.  They are the poster boys.  They have done things we admire.  They are vastly under-represented in the world of wealth.

Student Debt - Bernie must run.  He is our hope.

Financial Fraud uncovered - sigh -

Some is too funny. 

and at first  first, you want to think how nasty the world that spawned his is, that he can be ignored in it.

Thing I think that make me wonder.

Today, in the basement laundry of the building where I live, I met a nameless woman who has done wash there since 1978.  We bemoaned the state of the machines. and as the elevator rose shared a brief ride together.  

In Edinburgh the public drying rooms were a source for social improvement.  

Today the poor wash their close together, the rich apart.

 Capital opens with

The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as “an immense accumulation of commodities,”^[1] its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity.  

Which is a rather amazing sentence.

Reading Marx

I was not surprised  to learn that

Karl Marx gets a bad rap.

• Marx understood capitalism.
• He was impressed by its vigor: total wealth produced
• He was distressed by distribution of the excess profit.
• He assumed this could not be modified and justified revolution.

He was cancelled: his ideas declared heresy.

His cancellation cost us greatly since Marx' Capital is as fundamental to capitalism as  Darwin's Origin is to biology.  For more than a hundred years, the scientific capitalist west has  ignored Capital and tools it contains which might improve governance.  Ideas verboten because of Marx' cancellation.  Truth cannot be cancelled.

We are now entering a time, where we can no longer afford to endure the effects of unbridled capitalism.  Chomsky explained Marx' cancellation as a consequence of the Manufacturing Consent.  We must overcome this process and apply  the tools of Marx, if we are to save our planet while  addressing  problems that drove Marx' followers to revolution.  

 

It is a problem in any organization

when a subgroup uses the power of the organization rather than the power of persuasion  to control the members of the organization, i.e. to demand unwilling assent.

I feel a bit of the archaeologist here, observing (and joining) the tribe which has ruled my building.  They have grown close over years of feasting and I, (sadly for me) was the first to sign up and be stuck with the bill.  So I follow the rules and am admitted to the tribe of rulers.  We rulers, of course, are sworn  to follow only the interest of the group of shareholders.

What follows...

is the next meeting of the rulers, in which the wicked queen  lashes out  to 

America's Christian rulers once again starve children.

 Our governments vilest strategy, denying food and medicine to those ruled by those declared to be our enemy, e.g. Cuba, Afghanistan(Taliban), and Iran.

America, thy name is Hypocrisy.

Man Cave

 One of the amazing things about being with Sarah

 is that for the first time in my life, I have a man cave.  I grew up in the world of father knows best, where father passed his time in the living room surrounded by playful children and optionally, a wife or Uncle Charley.  Thankfully, such was not to be my fate, in later life at least. 

What is life?

You should watch the video What is Life with Paul Nurse (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92oMfkuOIlA). ('What is Life?' is hereafter known as the question).  It is the perfect reductionist introduction to the question.  I propose a more holistic yet mathematical (scientific) viewpoint. 

As Nurse points out, the reductionist approach to the question relies on   QM to understand the minutiae of the chemistry and computation upon which life relies.  We now understand the hardware of life at the finest levels.  The reductionist analysis supplies the base on which we build an  enumerable model of life. 

We consider a discrete (enumerable) model whose elements (nodes) are the 4D subsets of spacetime, living volumes, that are life. The elements are organized into a dag whose directed edges reflect ancestry, containment and time. The dag induces a decomposition of 'spacetime contained in life'. This enumerable model has a natural physical representation in 4D space and a rich natural geometry; it suggests a myriad of new inquiries into the question:

1. What properties characterize living volumes.
2. How are living volumes embedded within non-living volumes.

Containment and inheritance induce a partial order and metric on these subsets. These metrics, of course, originate in spacetime itself, but as has been the case many times, alternative coordinate systems can offer new understandings.

Natural modes of this model could naturally be interpreted as emergent properties .

Words have no meaning only interpretations

The law is many things.

It is a digital probe into humanity.  

... a discrete constraint on behavior in a continuous world.  

... the way we settle disputes without extra-legal violence.

... a marker of our progress on the road to civilization.  

My god

There are many solutions to the cosmic equation and God may be part of some but not of mine, other than as that which unifies us all with each other with other creatures and with the world . if this is God then I am a believer .

Framed Bubble Sculptures

From the wikipedia page on Calculus of Variations

Plateau's problem requires finding a surface of minimal area that spans a given contour in space: a solution can often be found by dipping a frame in a solution of soap suds. Although such experiments are relatively easy to perform, their mathematical interpretation is far from simple: there may be more than one locally minimizing surface, and they may have non-trivial topology.  

(Consider the many worlds interpretation of QM)  In different worlds (or on different dips) we find a variety of framed bubble sculptures.  (Engineering issues aside)  Could the realized configuration be interpreted as a reflection of a path through the many worlds.   The bubble sculptures themselves are an emergent phenomenon.  Could the realized configuration be a function of inherently random quantum fluctuations.  

Can Trump do what Trump has done?

Armed thugs are in cities around the country.  Trump has brought our Iron Boot home.  He has made the need for choice clear.    Can Trump do what Trump has done?  He has sent armed goons into cities around the country. 

Localities have complained and the courts have sided with Trump, so far.  There will, of course be places where the courts disagree, perhaps in CA, perhaps in NY.  Trump might choose to obey the court or not. 

If Trump obeys that court, it goes to the Supremes.

If the Supremes support Trump, I expect no election.

If they don't support Trump, he will rail against the Supremes (who will bask in their 'independence'), continue vilifying democrats and widely denying access in the many Republican controlled states, might manage an electoral victory.

If he looses, ask the military.  

A night's discovery

It is hot and humid here. My phone claims not, but my body is. Hot and humid. My cave is a garret and my water two floors down. I am old and thirsty and it is not close. I walk down the stairs, religiously holding banisters, one left and one right. One does not want to end a heap on the floor. As I return to the batfry, the hairs rise on my arms and I think not my lover's ex-husbands ghost returned but static electricity. As I drag my damp hands along the wooden banisters I accumulate quite a charge, realizing it gave me quite a charge as well.

Coronavirus, Aptil 21

Coronavirus is here.  My life goes on: somewhere between dream and beyond.  And what do I think of but Bernie as Biden's Director of Pandemic Response.
I listen to Harari's class and think of the changes as if in a different dimension.



Humankind lives in a world of dreams shaped by words: god, baryon, evil, gravity, ethics, news, travel, terror, carbon, freedom, greed, enemy, consciousness, measurement, family.  Some words have interpretations which can be discussed mathematically; we call those discussions science.  Some words do not: we call those discussions, humanities.  Science does not tell us how to behave, that is the realm of the humanities; however, it gives us information to help us understand and evaluate potential actions.

I'm back, at the start of a new life.  The mCRC is gone & I am well.  Halejulah!  Or so they say, but who am I to doubt.

Life is a gift and never more than now.

So how to lead this new life that is mine.  As I led the last one, or better, or different at least.  Perhaps less to survive and more to explore.

Life could not be more interesting.  Whether curse or blessing remains to be seen.

Mass transit

Cities hold people. People move.

Personal motorized transport is broken.  Cities need safe, clean, reliable transport.

Many apps support current transit systems including real-time arrival estimates. One feature which has been lacking is the ability to predict or at least display load factors on vehicles at various times. Load Factor reflects itself in standing time.

On heavily-used transit systems different routes may require a different amounts of standing as well as walking and travel time. In general we tend to ignore the cost of standing however there is a large and growing segment of the population, the elderly for whom standing in public transit is difficult if not dangerous.

Overcrowded Vehicles lead to elderly persons standing in unsafe situations.

Ideally society would solve this problem by producing young who happily gave their seats to the elders. sadly this is not the case. Whether it ever was is a question of some debate.

In any case, the question arises whether Google (or someone else) can compute the load factors using the information gathered from users on the buses.

How to behave

Can we express a moral system by a set of possessors of rights and judge the morality of an act by the degree to which it interferes with each of these rights.  Rights might  include:

• Life: i.e. continued physical existence, food, housing, education, health care ...
• Autonomy: i.e. freedom (to control ones own body, work, vote, assemble, speak, correspond, ...)

A set of possessors is a group of corporeal objects (or collections of objects) whose members may possess rights.  Rights come in two varieties, those that can be assigned and those than cannot.  

• Exactly how a possessor is defined is extremely important.  The difference between  considering  (1) 'self-aware' beings vs (2) 'potentially self-aware' beings as possessors corresponds to the difference between the most extreme proLife and proChoice positions.

A moral system involves choosing some from column Life and some from column Autonomy and deciding what sets of possessors you recognize.  Different societies and different cultures choose differently.  For example, the EU tends to include more in Life & Autonomy, and less in possessors of right than the US.

In 21st century America, we argue about what group possesses the right to life, i.e. when and in what circumstances is abortion legal, and about what constitutes life and autonomy which God has granted and which the state should therefore respect.