Prometheus 6 - About me, not you

I'll probably lose my whole audience with stuff like this

Fri, 18 Mar 2005 06:51:27 -0500

I have absolutely no proof for anything in this post.

We live in this four dimensional universe, right? Three dimensions plus time. Did you ever wonder why you can perceive the tree dimensional nature of things and not the temporal one?

What if I said you not only can, you do...you just don't call it that.

Picture this. If you stand on the geographic north pole of the Earth, it's like being at the peak of a hill. In every direction you look, the curved surface of the earth falls away from you, curves in a single direction you could call "down." Looking out across the universe, what you see "curves" in a direction you could call "the past."

When you look into the night sky, you're looking into infinity. And the average human interprets it as a bowl. You flatten it out. There's some stuff we can recognize, the moon planets, and everything else is the horizon.

Kind of like Reconstruction

Thu, 10 Mar 2005 09:48:20 -0500

Another weird one...just about everything in this category will be.

Jordan Ellenberg ends his Slate article, Does Gödel Matter?, with this:

His work was revolutionary, yes, but it was a revolution of the most unusual kind: one that abolished the constitution while leaving the material circumstances of the citizens more or less unchanged.

If you know what the incompleteness theorem says:

Given any system of axioms that produces no paradoxes, there exist statements about numbers which are true, but which cannot be proved using the given axioms.

you'll immediately understand its appeal to non-mathematicians of a mystical bent.

Picking up where we left off this weekend

Wed, 9 Mar 2005 10:46:18 -0500

I had the choice of rewriting this material directly or posting a metaphorical story I wrote a while back.

Guess which option I took.

A Sense of Scale
by Alim Ra
Copyright ©2096

Can you remember the first time you met a Griot? Probably not…we are not obviously different than humans, and come in the full range of physical, mental and emotional types that humans do. Nothing outward would give any indication that we are different in any way from the humans you encounter every day.

You probably do remember the first time you realized someone you knew was a Griot, though. Most likely it was during some crisis; it may have been physical, it may have been spiritual, but either way it was overwhelming. And some one person stepped up. He created what needed creating, she destroyed what needed destruction, they dispatched with calm demeanor the needs of the moment. . . then moved on to the next thing.

In all the open source software I have, there is not a single wiki

Tue, 8 Mar 2005 21:35:55 -0500

Scott Wickham dropped by to let me know about his new wiki-based web site.

Contract for Black America

In time this wiki will be used to create the contract for black america and so much more. This is a place to gather ideas and information and to create plans . -- Scott Wickham -- founder of blackcontract.com

The two contracts: First we need to make a contract with ourselves within our community and second we need to make a contract with those outside our community.

Cobb dropped word on it in the first open thread (which is likely to be the only active one until the fifth, by which time comments on the first will autoclose).

Having told you this, I will explain why I'll not likely add a thing to it.

LATER: As I say below, my thing ain't perfect. There are people I got beef with. But Scott isn't really one of them.

Why I'm not crazy and you're probably not either

Sat, 5 Mar 2005 08:59:37 -0500

Though it seems a serious diversion, I'm asking you to bear with me and run this thought experiment. It's not mine, it's Albert Einstein's. He used it to explain the repercussions of relativity to non-technical folks. He used light because its speed is fundamental and he was looking for the fundamental. I'm going to use sound because I want you to feel this understanding in your bones. It may seem more quantum mechanical than ballistic, but no one said ballistics was a piece of cake either.

Here's the set up: You're in a train, dead center of a box car. You have a box that emits a selected tone when you push a button and four sound activated switches. You mount the switches at either end of the box car along the axis you'll be traveling along and the axis perpendicular to the center of that axis and the tone generator at the intersection of the two axises (is that plural for 'axis'?). The switches are programmed to mark the time it receives the selected tone.

Physics

Fri, 4 Mar 2005 14:40:11 -0500

And so it begins...again

I think I need to start over. Not that I've written anything here that is incorrect, it's that I want to use the correct metaphors at the correct levels. That's what I meant the other day about working in mythic mode.

A mythos, to me, provides a framework, a set of assumptions, from which you can reason or on which you can base your decisions or within which your decisions make sense. A myth is a specific story or narrative that communicates or supports specific elements of a mythos. Unsupported elements of the mythos I call beliefs. Now, I could tell you about the unsupported elements of my personal mythos because there are very, very few. And I could tell you my personal mythology is organized around metaphors of physics and geometry. But my mythos...that's a tough one. It would sound like the recitation of a set of rules.

Shaving with Occam's Razor

Fri, 4 Mar 2005 14:30:30 -0500

Here's a rarely used category.

Couple of days ago I told cnulan in the comments he was looking at something on the quantum mechanics level when ballistics would be the right level. He responded

Alrighty then, break it down for me in plain and simple terms that I can understand.

Never has such a simple and fair sounding question thrown me into such turmoil.

I've mentioned before (in a post at The Niggerati Network that got blown away when I screwed up the site in December; I'll repost it here when I'm done with this thing) I use a physics metaphor for society. Well, I use that metaphor for sociology, psychology, politics, you name it. When reasoning I use my (totally qualitative) understanding of physics the same way an evangelical uses his (adjective of your choice) understanding of his Bible...to suggest paths to useful information, patterns by which solutions can be found and against which suggestions can be measured.

It's taken almost four months to the day

Sat, 22 Jan 2005 18:42:12 -0500

Sometime today I "earned" the first $100 in commission from the Google ads. Amazing.

A bit of a warning

Mon, 8 Nov 2004 06:04:51 -0500

I got up too damn early.

I found out there are over 150 episodes of Yu-Gi-Oh! There goes my DVD collection plans…it's bad enough that I have seven years of Stargate SG-1 (not to mention the eighth year AND the the first 10 episodes of Stargate Atlantis…and I feel no guilt because when they are relased on DVD I'll get them the first week like I did with all the other years).

I have no idea why but I've been singing "Wookin Pa Nub" all damn morning.

Suffice to say I'm in a pretty strange mood.

Even though I still got techie stuff to do

Sun, 7 Nov 2004 09:43:53 -0500

…now that my voice is back online I guess I have a thing or two to post about.

Oh, yeah, I'm back

Sat, 23 Oct 2004 19:39:12 -0400

I couldn't stay for the student activism session. But it was a very worthwhile seminar to me. I think I see a couple of places my skills can be useful. I have a very interesting narrative composed of a fusion of the sessions I attended. You will see that or summaries of each session…the latter is most likely. I made some very interesting contacts as well, and missed one…Frederick J. Streets, Yale's chaplain. He was speaking with two other gentlemen I had specific "now" things to address with and Chaplain Streets slipped out on me before I could mention a "later" thing to him. Fortunately, it's real easy to find the address of officials, professors and such at Ivy League schools.

And I kicked in 25 bucks to the Black student alumni thing by way of a t-shirt. Says "BL

That's it for the night

Tue, 19 Oct 2004 20:30:41 -0400

I'm not a Yankees or Red Sox fan. Not really even a baseball fan.

But these last two games got me. So I'm done for the night.

I'm going to bed

Sun, 10 Oct 2004 20:35:00 -0400

I just overwrote The Niggerati Network with a backup that's just short of a month old. That sort of shit only happens when I overextend.

Just so's ya know

Thu, 12 Aug 2004 18:11:39 -0400

I'm feeling a little burnt out today, so tomorrow will be a real light day. May unplug the cable modem and watch movies all day.

Personal archeology II

Fri, 16 Jul 2004 06:45:31 -0400

Going thru the stuff I got out of storage I found a 15 year old notebook(!) and my Bulworth VCR tape.

Every Black person in the country should watch Bulworth. I'm watching it now before it falls apart.

LATER: The tape is half melted and the sound is truly screwed. I need a new copy.