Anthropic Principle

In physics and cosmology, the anthropic principle is the philosophical argument that observations of the physical Universe must be compatible with the conscious life that observes it. Some proponents of the argument reason that it explains why the Universe has the age and the fundamental physical constants necessary to accommodate conscious life. As a result, they believe that the fact that the Universe's fundamental constants are within the narrow range thought to allow life is not remarkable.
It occurs to me that not only must it allow conscious life to exist, it must allow me to exist and furthermore to exist now.  My span of life is infinitessimal compared to the [presumed] infinity of time.

A Curious Question

Am I a figment of my imagination?

Patrick

I know two men named Patrick.  One is Chinese and the other is Estonian.  How likely is that.

A Constitutional Question

If it took a constitution amendment to prohibit alcohol, Why didn't it take one to prohibit other drugs?

A Tax Suggestion

We might let the Bush tax cuts expire (except for the estate tax).  In return, eliminate payroll taxes and the corporate income taxes.  Voila!  More jobs.  And it is known that payroll taxes are regressive.

New Deal or Raw Deal?

Read this book!  Why?  Because those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it.

Railroad Museum

Ethanol

The stupidest federal subsidy. - By Robert Bryce - Slate Magazine

The elephant in the room

When the deficit is being discussed, why no mention of farm subsidies and the ethanol boondoggle?

The Obamacare Act

I'd heard that Congress had passed this act without having read it.  I thought I might read it so I found it online.

http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=111_cong_bills&docid

It is 2,454 pdf pages long!  I'm not about to print it on my printer.  I'm not sure what size the file would be to download it.  I suppose a printed copy could be obtained from the GPO.  A digital copy would be better for the cross-linking and indexing necessary for a truly useful reference.  I believe parts of it are redundant as already covered by other laws.  A complete law course could be devoted to it.  One could make a career out of interpreting it.  Who will prepare the case challenging the constitutionality?  [at least some parts]  Will the judges understand it better than those who passed it?  Think of the expense of complying with it. 

Why I won't be elected.

If I had my way I would:
1. Eliminate payroll taxes and corporate income taxes.
2. Eliminate federal subsidies including those for agriculture, energy, and education.
3. Legalize all drugs.
4. Eliminate the senior tax exemption and make Social Security payments fully taxable.
5. Eliminate earmarks.
6. Merge the Department of Agriculture into the Department of Commerce.
7. Make it illegal for public employees to strike.
8. Eliminate the minimum wage.
9. Eliminate the exemption for tax-free interest.
10. Repeal big hunks of federal regulations.
11. Simplify the federal tax code:  Get rid of provisions designed to favor particular groups of people.
12. Get the federal government out of education.  Don't insure education loans.
13. Increase gasoline taxes significantly.

For Illinois:
1.  Raise the state income tax so the state can pay it's bills.

Another reason I won't be elected:
I'm not running for anything!

All Cows Eat Grass

I know the numonics FACE, Every Good Boy Does Fine, and All Cows Eat Grass, but I couldn't remember the other one so I manufactured Good Boys Don't Feed Ants.  I like it better than Good Boys Do Fine Always which I later found.

Piano

I have a Radio Shack piano keyboard and am working on Piano for The Adult Beginner.  Sight reading for the left hand is difficult for me.  I am working on "Give My Regards to Broadway."

Hooray!

The Bears won.

The Libertarian

At every stage we see a populist frenzy to support new layers of regulation, each of which in its own way kills jobs and chokes off economic growth. --Richard Epstein

Real Clear Politics

One of my favorite blogs.  Today it led me to these three editorials:

(1) What can be done about the economy?
         Peter Goodman, New York Times

(2) A Troika of Big G'ovt, Big Business & Big Labor
         Warren Meyer, Forbes

(3) Hatching Bigger Government
         Steve Chapman, Chicago Tribune

Where are the data?

How is consumption distributed by type?  How much of it is essential.  (Really essential such as food, clothing, and shelter and probably transportation and arguably essential like health services and security and supposedly essential like education.)  How are jobs distributed by the consumption they provide (essential or otherwise including the counterproductive ones)?  How are they distributed by activity:  physical such as operating machinery or using tools; selling; keeping tract; managing; engineering; teaching; health care; miscellaneous other?

Government

Parkinson's Law [one of them] is true: Government always expands. This is a form of evolution because it is controlled by politicians and others with a strong vested interest in such expansion. It's like asking teachers to put a value on education or scientists on research. Why are academics liberals? Could it be because the bulk of their funding comes from state and local governments? I am a libertarian but am convinced it is a lost cause. All branches of government vote to expand their own powers. Could it be otherwise? Game theory says not. Read Predictioneering.

Think about it.

The super rich don't eat that much.  They do occupy more space but are we that short of space?  They have more clothes in their closets but they can't wear out most of it.  What eventually happens to it?  Surely they don't burn them.  Even their houses are in effect recycled.

Where are the figures comparing the most and least effective consumers.  [Sort of a negative value-added.]

Wealth and income are not zero-sum items.

My Haiku

What are you doing?
I am counting syllibi:
One, Two, Three, Four, Five.

It comes to my mind:
Today is another day
Like it always is.

It has some content.
It is not about dried fruit,
Just some other things.

I have read somewhere
That I think, therefor I am.
I mostly agree.

I, I, I, I, I!
Must it be just about I?
I do not think so.

Today it will rain
So I have my umbrella.
I am sure it won't.

Enquiring Minds

Is the universe finite? If so is it possible to find the center? Apparently not as it is uniform as far as the eye can see in all directions (giving us the illusion of being at the center). Could we then estimate what percent of the total universe is contained in the visable universe?

Ignoring time for the moment, could we imagine our three-dimensional world as the surface (brane) of a sphere in four dimensional space? i.e. If we could go far enough would we eventually return to where we started? In that case there would be no center, just as there is no center of the surface of a sphere.

What would the implications be of the universe not being finite?

My Favorite Blogger

The Reference Frame

http://motls.blogspot.com/

Why Don't They? Math Vision No. 2

I envision a dictionary of terms used in mathematics. It should be linked back until undefined terms are reached. Synonyms could be defined by reference to a single term. English should be the base with terms in other languages (esp. German and French) defined as synonyms. Common terms used in examples might be included (e.g. orange = object, oranges = objects, apples = objects).

Measurement terms would need careful treatment:

yard = 36 inches
yard = unit of distance
Would distance need to be an undefined term?

A seperate list should be made of undefined terms.

Why Don't They? Math Vision No. 1

I envision a complete [anyway extensive] non-redundant mathematical encyclopedia. Could search engines and AI help? What does Wolfram already have? Could the math part of Wikipedia provide a base? It should be extensively linked.

What is The Press?

A blogger questioned whether supreme court justices had the technical expertise to decide whether bloggers should have the same rights as Journalists. What rights are those? "Press" as used in the constitution doesn't have the meaning publishers. It is was short for printing press so freedom of the press is the right to print. It is a right of all people, not a special group. Compare freedom of speech. Professional speakers are called orators. Noone would claim that orators have rights that I don't have. Neither should professional printers have rights that I do not have. Together freedom of speech and of the press are freedom to communicate. One could ask whether a new form of communication (the internet) should be included.

Journalists try to expand their rights to the right to know (as agents of the public) and the right to conceal evidence of crimes justified as "protecting sources" in convulated service to this so-called right of the public to know.

I believe one or more states have passed a law to formalize this presumed right. These are not the same as constitutional rights.

Spotted in Borders

Peter Hedges's new Book, The Heights.  Peter is best known for writing What's Eating Gilbert Grape?

Interesting Data

The center of the earth is heated to 12,000 degrees Fahrenheit, hotter than the surface of the sun. Where does all this energy come from? At least half and perhaps as much as 90 percent (no one knows for sure) comes from the breakdown of uranium and thorium atoms in the earth’s crust.  --from a site called The Infrastructuralist

Widowed Fourteen Years

        April

Eating alone,
  I notice the forest preserve
  across the way.
The taller trees barely show life:
  further for the sap to rise.
The underbrush is fringed
  in new-leaf green.
Soon it will be two years
  since we carried you to
  a garden you could not see.
The spot overlooked the water where
  swans had delighted our children.
They are not children now
  except in memory.
I weep for them.  I weep for me.

4-17-98  (revised 4-19-01)   --Harlow B. Staley

Swan Watch

        Swan Watch

For seven years swans have had young.
Coyote and fox for six have won.

Two pair but only one cygnet
that hasn't been a meal - not yet.

We watch and hope that all is well
Today, not sure, we cannot tell,

for we've yet to locate the spot
where mom and pop have led their tot.

Their turf an island yesterday.
Perhaps it wasn't safe to stay.

The ducks are here, the heron too
along the shores - a pleasant view.

Tomorrow I shall check again;
Perhaps this year the swans will win.

8-2-00 --Harlow B. Staley

Universes

In set theory space can transformed while preserving distance by translation, rotation, and mirror images. Could our universe have a mirror image?

Why is our universe composed of particles instead of anti-particles? If it were composed of anti-particles we wouldn't know it and would call them particles and call the particles anti-particles.

Maybe after the big bang (or other beginning) there were two separate regions one of which had more particles which destroyed the anti-particles and the other one of which had more anti-particles which destroyed the particles. Call these regions universes.

Imagine the collision of a particle universe with an anti-particle universe. Wouldn't that create a very big bang?

E = mc^2

Calculations have been made based on E = mc^2 of the amount of energy in a drop of water. The trouble is that there is no known way to release that energy. Even in atomic bombs only a small portion of the energy is converted to energy because the atomic number remains the same, doesn't it? The only way I know of to annihilate a proton is with an antiproton and those are hard to come by.

Btw, I've always had trouble identifying the units of that equation which contains no k.

Strings

I wonder whether comparing the strings in string theory to violin strings isn't carrying analogy too far. Violin strings are never loops.


I think it is misleading to speak of 10 (or 11)dimensions. Call them variables, three of space, one of time, and 6 (or 7) of something else (singular or plural?). Are the six (or 7) all equivalent to each other the way the three space ones are? Calling them coiled-up space doesn't seem very satisfactory.

Allstate's Menu System

I didn't want to buy or change coverage.  I didn't want to make a payment.  I didn't want to file a claim.  I didn't want to locate an agent.  I didn't want to know about my account.  There was no choice for "Other" or "None of the above."  I forget how but I finally reached a person who knew the difference between a Policy enewal Declarations and a Policy Form the latter of which I wanted mailed to me.  I hope I receive one and not another copy of the former.  At the end a survey came up asking two questions:  What I thought of their system (not much) and whether my problem was solved (remains to be seen, but that wasn't one of the choices).

Kindle: The Missing Manual

As far as I know, it still is.  My daughter has had a Kindle for about a year but was unaware that she could play Minesweeper, a game she likes, on it.

An Open Letter to Amazon Com

I bought a Kindle Model D00701.  I bought a book titled "The Complete User's Guide To the Amazing Amazon Kindle" by Stephen Windwalker.  Pages 25-27 describe "Kindle Keyboard and Menu Shortcuts" mostly involving the ALT key.  Most of those don't work on my Kindle.  I wondered whether the problem was with my unit, my operation of the unit, or the book.  I asked support in an e-mail but their response was the suggestion for phone support.  The person I talked to had an accent and didn't seem to understand the question.  When he finally tried to transfer me the connection was lost.  Why couldn't they just e-mail me the answer?  I sent another request but got the same response.

from my basement

NEC/PC-8201A

This unit goes back to 1984.  It runs on four AA batteries.  The screen is eight lines by 40 characters.  Basic and text programs are built in.  It weighs 3.8 pounds.  It has a variety of interfaces including RS-232C, parallel printer, and floppy disk.  A tape cassette reader is built in.

Bottle Brush

Where the time goes

Monday, March 22, 2010     11:41am     McDonald's     Wt.:  175

A dillar a doller, a ten o'clock scholar, what brings me here so soon.
I used to come at ten o'clock, but now I'm here at [almost] noon.

After coffee, browsing, and walking, I may get home at three.

No matter what I choose to do then, I will be putting off six other things.  Plus everything takes longer than expected.  As Phyllis says, "There are no five minute jobs."

Weekly stuff:  laundry, shopping, bills.

Part of the problem is that I sleep more than I used to, and I move slower.

At night I watch Wheel of Fortune and often more.

And I read.

Yesterday, I tossed some more clutter and printed a few pictures for the photo club.

My Network

I have five [!] computers on my home network using the at&t modem-router and their DSL line.  All now run on Windows XP.  Two of them were on Windows 98 sitting side by side.  When one of them had a hard-drive failure I managed to replace it with a similar refurbished unit with Windows XP.  Then it was time to install XP (that I bought some time ago) on the other one.  A third desktop sits upstairs in my bedroom.  It uses a Netgear wireless adapter.  I have a laptop which also requires an adapter.  Not long ago I bought an Acer netbook which I love.  It uses XP and has wireless built in.  Finally I have a MyBook external hard drive attached to the bedroom computer which backs everything up. By the way, the two side-by-side computers have Ethernet connections to the router.

Pathagorean Theorem

Take an arbitrary square. Along the top side measure a distance a across from the upper-left corner. Using the same length measure down from the upper-right corner, across to the left from the lower-right corner, upward from the lower-left corner. Label all four of the measured distances a (equal by construction). Label the rest of each side b (equals subtracted from equals are equal). Connect the points between a and b of adjacent sides creating four congruent trangles (two sides and included angle). Since they are congruent the third sides of each triangle are equal. Label these sides c. The interior area can be shown to be a square. We have already show the sides, c, to be equal. The angles are straight angles (180 degrees) less the sum of the two acute angles of right triangles (90 degrees). Now we use the fact that the area of the whole is equal to the sum of the areas of the parts. The area of the whole is side squared = (a + b)^2. The area of the center square is c^2. The area of each corner triangle is one-half the base times the height which is axb/2, so four of them have area 2xaxb. Therefore

(a + b)^2 = c^2 + 2xaxb.

(a + b)^2 - 2xaxb = c^2

a^2 + 2xaxb + b^2 - 2xaxb = c^2

a^2 + b^2 = c^2

Or the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides.

Ok, I skipped a couple of proofs. Construct a rectangle with base width w and height h. Draw a diagonal creating two congruent triangles (two sides and included angle). Thus two times the area of the triangle is the area of the rectangle making the area of one triangle wxh/2.

Now consider a corner of the rectangle from which the diagonal is drawn. It is a right angle divided into two angles each of which is an acute angle of a right triangle. This shows that the sum of the acute angles of a right triangle are a right triangle. It doesn't matter that these acute angles are actually from different triangles because the two are congruent.

Conciousness

Conciousness is not understood nor, in my opinion, understandable. What physical process could possibly create awareness? Could a robot (or a computer) be concious? If it were how would we know? Conciousness is not the same as intelligence. Machines can be intelligent. People speculate on whether dogs or other animals are concious. I believe they are but have no way of knowing. The only conciousness I can be sure of is my own. It is unique to me and to my lifetime. We have an enormous amount of memory stored in our brains. We may not be able to describe in detail our drive to work but we notice if something changes. The amount of memory we are aware of at one time is very limited. I have no awareness of anything that happened before I was born and don't expect any after I die. Suppose I hadn't been born. After all, the chances of my having been must be infintessimal. And even more improbable is my being alive today. My lifetime is not even a blink in the age of the earth. Suppose time could be reset. I wish I were 19 again. If I were I wouldn't know anything about the future. Time is the only one of Einstein's four dimensions that is unidirectional. That is supposedly guaranteed by the law of increasing entropy.

MIZAR

MIZAR is a formal language that enables proof-checking.  The most important applications of MIZAR today are playing the role of a proof assistant to support creating rigorous mathematics, in mathematics education, and in software and hardware verification.

So how much mathematics can you teach a computer? 

Dimensions

I find it next to impossible to imagine more than three dimensions. Going perpendicular (orthagonal) to a line creates a plane. Do it again and you go vertically into space. The next step requires a new kind of distance such as time or density. When I try to imagine a sphere in four-space all my mind's eye can come up with is a sphere in three-space. Also, consider tangents:   A line can be tangent to a circle. A plane can be tangent to a sphere [what we normally call a sphere]. Just try to imagine space being tangent to a hyper-sphere [S^3].

Admittedly this can all be handled algebraically.

In Naive Lie Theory we are introduced to quaterions a1 + bi + cj + dk of absolute value 1, or unit quaterions which satisfy the equation

a squared + b squared + c squared + d squared = 1.

This extends the usual distance equations in two dimensions (x,y) or three (x,y,z) because the square root of 1 is 1. The four-dimensional coordinates are a, b, c, and d. Circles and spheres are defined in terms of points a given distance from an origin. This is extended to higher dimensions.

These "shapes" form groups based on rotations (Special Orthogonal) or rotations and reflections (Orthogonal).

Much of this algebra is put in matrix form including the definitions of 1, i, j, and k.

AOL and My Netbook

A netbook has fewer lines than a laptop and AOL grabs so much of it for advertising that there is little left for reading e-mail.  They really need a full-screen key.  Or am I missing something?

Next Blog

I find using Next Blog to be a very inefficient way for me to find blogs of interest to me.  Many are not in English, and many are family blogs of no interest to me.  Math blogs are mostly of High School math classes.  Blogs of Note doesn't do it.  Any suggestions?

Windows Registry

I located a Microsoft document Windows registry information for advanced users.  It provided information on saving, modifying, and restoring the registry and some basic information on its contents including size limits and programs that could be used to modify it.  It didn't have what I was looking for, namely a way to compare two register files or enough format information for me to write my own.  Wouldn't that be a valuable tool to have?

Naive Lie Theory Note 4

S^n stands for the unit sphere in n+1 dimensional space.  Perhaps this is because the circle in two dimensional space was the first "sphere" recognized making it S^1.  The unit sphere is defined as the set of points a unit distance from the origin.  Applying this definition to a line (one-dimensional space) would give the two points at plus one and minus one.  If this had been named S^1, S^n would be the unit sphere in n-dimensional space.  [I have used bold-face for the open or double letter used in the text. Also ^n stands for superscript n.]

Naive Lie Theory Note 3

Notation and definitions are introduced in a rather haphazard manner and this is complicated by an incomplete index.

Naive Lie Theory Note 2

In this book new concepts are introduced in the exercises and there are no solutions to the exercises in the back of the book.  This makes self study difficult.

Naive Lie Theory Note 1

Although I have a Master's Degree in math, I was in my 80s before I became aware of branches of mathematics developed before I was born.  How sad is that.

Note on entering blogs

I prepared a draft offline in Word and used select all and copy hoping to put it into my blog but at that point there is no paste that I could find and no insert such as Word has.  Copying and retyping would be tedious.

Minimum Wage

Jean Hay seems to think we could legislate prosperity with a higher minimum wage.  Don't economists know better?  If so shouldn't they say so more loudly.  Just wondering.

I am Wondering . . .

Last night in bed I noticed that it was light enough in the room to see - apparently a combination of moonlight and snow on the ground.  How much might moonshine affect temperature?  Too little to be measureable, I suspect, but still calculable.  What is the temperatue cycle of the surface of the earth and how is it affected by earth-shine?

What is the ratio of moon-mass to earth-mass?

How far is the center of mass of the earth-moon complex from the center of the earth?

Does the moon create tides inside the earth?

How much do tides slow down the earths rotation and what must the effect on the moon be to preserve angular rotation of the system?

What caused the earth's tilt?  Season's are caused by tilt, not distance, but shouldn't have some affect?  What is it?

What other planets and moons generate internal heat, like the earth?  What is the ratio of internally generated to heat from the sun?

Why don't continents sink?  Of couse the answer is that their material is lighter than the magma they float upon.  I suppose the higher the mountain, the deeper the keel.  Could the potential energy in mountains be captured?

What causes magnetic poles to move?  Why does the magnetism of earth reverse periodically and how often does it occur?

Doesn't snow reflect more sunlight into space?  Could we stop global warming by painting the earth white?  Or green with trees?  [There is always the question:  "Is the possible practible?"]  At least make roads and parking lots white.

Could we use solar energy on the moon to have robots self-replicate?  [Ok, the answer is "No."]  Could robots mine the moon and manufacture more solar panels?  The problem is no (or at least insufficient) water.

Could floating solar panels (or offshore wind turbines) be used to create pure water from sea water?  In sufficient quantities to be useful?

I was just wondering.