The night country

I sat, once more in the late hours of darkness, in the
airport of a foreign city. I was tired as only both
the sufferer from insomnia and the traveler can be
tired. I had missed a plane and had almost a whole
night's wait before me. I could not sleep. The long
corridor was deserted. Even the cleaning women had
passed by.

In that white efficient glare I grew ever more
depressed and weary. I was tired of the endless
comings and goings of my profession; I was tired of
customs officers and police. I was lonely for home. My
eyes hurt. I was, unconsciously perhaps, looking for
that warm stone, that hawthorn leaf, where, in the
words of the poet, man trades in at last his wife and
friend. I had an ocean to cross; the effort seemed
unbearable. I rested my aching head upon my hand.

Later, beginning at the far end of that desolate
corridor, I saw a man moving slowly toward me. In a
small corner of my eye I merely noted him. He limped,
painfully and grotesquely, upon a heavy cane. He was
far away, and it was no matter to me. I shifted the
unpleasant mote out of my eye.

But, after a time, I could still feel him approaching,
and in one of those white moments of penetration which
are so dreadful, my eyes were drawn back to him as he
came on. With an anatomist's eye I saw this amazing
conglomeration of sticks and broken, misshapen pulleys
which make up the body of man. Here was an apt
subject, and I flew to a raging mental dissection.
How could anyone, I contended, trapped in this
mechanical thing of joints and sliding wires expect
the acts it performed to go other than awry?

The man limped on, relentlessly.

How, oh God, I entreated, did we become trapped within
this substance out of which we stare so hopelessly
upon our own eventual dissolution? How for a single
minute could we dream or imagine that thought would
save us, children deliver us, from the body of this
death? Not in time, my mind rang with my despair; not
in mortal time, not in this place, not anywhere in the
world would blood be staunched, or the dark wrong be
forever righted, or the parted be rejoined. Not in
this time, not mortal time. The substance was too
gross, our utopias bought with too much pain."

--Loren Eisley, "The Night Country"

Even so, we did what we believed in

1953. US. Death row. A bad poem, but elevated by its monumental context
and constrained by a simple encipherment revealing the authors.

Even so, we did what we believed in:
Treason, yes, perhaps, but with good cause.
History will judge by its own laws,
Each act within the sunlight of the season.
Love was what inspired us, a reason
As pure as any saint in Satan's jaws.
Nor was the god we worshipped through those wars
Demonized, as later all would see him.
Justice would not just sustain our guilt,
Undoing those who would undo a wrong,
Leaving us in lucid infamy.
Instead, it would remember what we willed
Under the illusion of a song
So beautiful it would the chained earth free.

Rhetoric

A little meta class for ruby
http://iq.org/rhetoric/rhetoric-0.2.0/doc/

Consciousness amplification

When the bladder is full but social sanction or distractions prevent instant relief, what does one do?

Jiggles about like a parkinsons patient! Simulating movement -- and if that is not enough, one does away with the similation and paces to and fro. One is a simulation but both are stimulation.

Over micturation we have limited conscious (verbal) control. Over movement we have greater conscious control. We use our conscious control over the latter to gain control over the former. Movement becomes the lever through which the conscious mind is amplified to control a greater share of the body.

The primitive cortex, the "inner lobster", ignores conscious statements about not micturating when the bladder is full. However it measures the movement of the body. It is simple and easily fooled by jiggling -- simulating walking.

Newborns too are fooled by the simulated walking of their parents to keep them calm. Here we see the first simple evidence that control over the body translates to control over emotional states.

Through techniques and calibrations like these we become not more conscious but our consciousness becomes more powerful --- the verbal will and higher planing centres of the neocortex and associated structures such as the cingulate cortex are able to obtain greater control over their environment.

We can see this to an extreme degree in those who are able to meditate their way through a C-section. Here the conscious domination of the inner lobster has been developed to such a degree that the little crustacean can not even flinch before the surgeon's cut.

Emile Zola

"I feel the deepest pleasure, dear friend, in a tete-a-tete with you. You can't imagine how much I have suffered from this squabble I have had with the masses, with the anonymous herd... Pretend for a moment that we are alone together in some remote place, far away from the hurly burly of life and that we are talking like old friends, who know each other's very soul, and understand each other just by a glance...
"For ten years we have been talking about art and literature...- and often dawn caught us still talking, searching the past, questioning the present, trying to discover truth, and to create for ourselves an infallible and comprehensive religion. We shuffled stacks of terrible ideas, we examined and rejected all ideologies, and after much arduous labour that outside one's personal life there exists only lies and one's stupidity."

-- from a letter to Cezanne from Emile Zola, ca. 1866

Underground banned in Iran

Close the door to world events and when one does not look they come in the window!

Begin forwarded message:

> Subject: thanks for your great book
>
> Hi !
>
> I'm from Tehran / Iran. I know that you've heard lots of
> news about Iran these days, but we have two Irans:
> one is the ruling party and the second is the people ! :)
> and I'm one of those people !
>
> I've just downloaded your book (underground) and
> read it all. it was a great work. I enjoyed a alot and
> blogged about it (http://FreeKeyboard.net/node/47 ).
> (oh man ! it is in Farsi !)
>
> And the second reason I'm writing you: I want to
> inform you that your site (underground-book) is censored
> in Iran !!! I'm also complained about it to my government
> but with no luck
>
> Thank you again for your great book and also THANK you
> for letting people download it and read it. We can not order
> copies here so it was a delight to download and read it legally :)

Taming the inner rat.

Don't worry about self flagellating christian guilt mania diet nonsense. Think about how much you eat. Think about the effect of being even 1 potato chip per plate out between energy demands and consumption. Daily energy demands for a woman approximates 10 mega joules. Pure fat has an energy density of around 3000 Kj/100g. So your energy demands can be met each day by a little over 333 gms of fat. A finger of butter or 3-5 chocolate bars. If you're 1/20th out, that's 17 gms of fat per day. Or 7.3Kg/year of pure fat. But adipose tissue is a complex of fat cells storing around 15Mj/Kg. So this translates to a 12.3Kg/year weight gain or loss (loss is easier to model as an extreme, due to fat cells having basel energy requirements). To the naive this would suggest a forward path of extreme conscious dietry control, but a little reflection will demonstrate that since most people are in equilibrium subconscious mechanisms must already tightly control body composition.

For what follows it is important to understand what you are. You are not your appetite. Now if we examine you closely, we see, merci, there is no clear place where you end and the rest of the universe begins. Likewise, there is no place where I end and the rest of the universe begins. Now invoking transitivity we see there is there is no place where you end and I begin. We are one. But you and I are words people use frequently and take pains not to confuse. This difference in language suggests a difference in reality that yields predictive power when dichotomised into two words. There's no place where red ends and green begins either, but red is not green even if they are on a spectrum. Rhetoricians call red=green argument from false spectrum. But just like I am not you, your breath is not you, your finger is not you, your eyes are not you, your thyroid, pituitary gland and medulla are not you, no neuron is you, infact, none of the parts of you are you.

You don't exist as discrete thing, because as we have now established, not only is there no place where you end, there is not even a place where you begin. But we know the word is useful! So what can we say? Since you are reading these words you are the ensemble of strongly connected (i.e primarily brain) causality interactions connected to the input of these words. In the same way the word Paris is has greater predictive power the closer it is to the epicenter of connectivity of the French capital, but Paris is not the geographical or connective epicentre of Paris. Now France is to Paris, as your brain is to the language processing areas of your brain. But within France there are other cities such as Le Mon Atier- les-Bains or Grenoble, that should not be called Paris because their connectivity with Paris is very weak. So to, within your brain there are subsystems the language processing areas are not meaning fully connected to. They operate independently. Many of parts of the cortex and brain stem are ancient and do not differ appreciably to identical subsystems in rats, crocodiles, or even lobsters. In particular those parts of the brain that regulate basic needs such as arousal, temperature, blood pressure, and appetite are very ancient.

We already established that you and these other sub regions of the brain must be different if the word you is to retain meaning. Hence we come to the following remarkable conclusion. You share your body with a lobster! This lobster, or perhaps more romantically, "inner rat", is a simple creature, and it controls homeostasis. It controls appetite and activity and You have no direct control over it. All you can do is move it from place to place and buy different things for it to eat. Otherwise you have less control over it than it has over you because it is able to influence your feelings of reward, temperature, hunger and activity.

This creature is very good at measuring your body composition and controlling your appetite without conscious control. It's a lovely, sophisticated device. If you don't want to get fat, eat cashews, not marshmellows, even though the former have four times the energy density, for they are a source of plant life to be and due to the common ancestory of man and plant a good source of life for women; a rich bounty that tells the lobster its food supply is plentiful. Marshmellows and other refined foods she may need to eat a mountain of to get, say, her folic acid needs met; a poor diet which may activate biological strategies for dealing with food scarcity (Store emergency reserves; We can't live on this stuff!).

Lack of exercise does not make people fat through decreased energy demands. Rather it changes the lobsters's perception as to how much weight the body may carry without detrimental effect. Exercised induced overheating and over energy expenditure from lugging extra weight around (it takes twice as much energy to lift twice as much weight) will be measured by the brain through metabolic products in the blood, activating body composition modification via change of appetite and activity levels, moving body composition to a form better suited to the exercise rich environment in which it finds itself. Everyone knows muscle fibres grow in response to exercise, but adaptions take place throughout the body and brain to minimise exercise induced stress and maximise efficiency. It's an optimisation problem with two variables. Reserves vs. movement efficiency. The global optima depends on the weightings of these two variables. You can change the weighting through conscious behavior, behavior which subconscious brain regions will then measure to control your appetite. God, who lets no good deed go unpunished, has ensured the traditional energy reduction diet has the effect of activating genetic food scarcity strategies, increasing appetite, decreasing activity and so resulting in subsequent weight gain.

My advise to anyone who wants to loose weight; deny yourself no complex food that primitive man would eat (vegetables, red meat, including organs, fish, eggs, fruit, nuts, all simply prepared). Your lobster knows how to be respond to those foods. Eat slowly so appetite change can control intake. Within this structure eat whatever tastes the most appealing. Foods which have something you lack will taste nicer till the need is for filled. Exercise to create weight induced over heating and carry stress to activate weight reduction strategies. How many overweight long distance runners do you know?

How can we untie the unknot?

But then thundering, inexorable realisation that the world is what the brain makes. Constraints in the meat give form to the symbols on the paper, to every inclination and imagining, to every cognitive process. Here then, this very sentence, out of the countable arrangements of matter limited to just a few forms the brain can see. So, on to understand the brain to understand the mind to understand mathematics to understand physics to understand the world, but then, just when this seems to be the path to enlightenment we see that constraints in the meat must arise from physical constraints. The meat of perception has been shaped by iterated selection and variation of ancestral nervous systems. How can we describe the tendencies of selection? By its constraints. The constraints of the physical system in which it selected. Above all, life must live and that is constrained by energy and momentum and mass and time and charge and gravity. A creature's abilities and imaginings reflect adaption to these constraints. We have no other notion but to point and say there it is. But these physical concepts are concepts of the mind. The self description is the constrained language of the brain. All folds in on itself. Start anywhere. Start nowhere. With boundless insight draw the circle tighter, but a circle it remains. How to hack reality? How to pierce the skin? How to find the spot on the wall where the illusion flickers and rip it open? We can relate here to there. Thing to Thing. How can there be more? How can there not be more.

Transparency in the cold light of Finland

We all have emotional instincts which react against our perceptions of the world. The interaction of these reactions losely defines society. If we perceive differently we react differently. An important class of perceptions are those things we can measure. By measuring different things we can change perception. By changing perception we can change reactions. By changing reactions we can change society.

Society has grown beyond our ability to perceive it accurately. Our brains are not adapted to the environment in which we find outselves. We can't predict important aspects of our societal environment. It's not designed to run on our brains. We're maladapted. In our evolutionary history we spent a lot of time tracking the behavior and reputations of small number of people we saw frequently. If we want some of the social benefits that a small society brings then we need computational crutches so when A fucks over B any C considering dealing with A will know. A society that can "think" in this way is able to route goodness to people who do good and away from those people who generate hurt. The decision as to what is good is too complicated to be formulated in regulation and elections are a very coarse expression of what people think is good. Any paper formulation will put power in the hands of a political and technocratic elite. Robust routing decisions must be made my individuals and individuals need tools to manage complexity enough so they can make them effectively in a modern society. You might argue that this just removes power one step -- now it's in the hands of people who measure things. Right. But it is one step removed and if history is a guide that one step can make all the difference.

Apropos Finland:

Transparency in the cold light of Finland

Therese Catanzariti Crikey's Scandinavian correspondent

In Finland, all individual tax returns are public information which makes for some interesting number crunching from the local media, as our Scandinavian correspondent, Therese Catanzariti, writes:

Have you ever wondered what your colleagues are earning? Have you ever wondered what your peer group are earning? Your next door neigbour? Your cousin? A guy you went to school with?

Finland takes "nosy-ness" to new dizzying heights. Finland is the most transparent public sector in the world but for those who think everyone should follow their lead, think about this. Think about this very very carefully.

All individual tax returns are public. Public. Yes. Public. No ATO secrecy and caring about your privacy for the Finnish Vero.

What does this mean? Every year the main newspapers trawl through the Finnish tax office. They then prepare a list of the top 1000 income earners and the top 1000 capital income earners. Then they publish it.
The list shows name, job, town and year of birth. It shows income (including stock options) and wealth. And then, the piece de resistance, how much tax paid as a proportion of salary.

There is even a list of last year's rankings - who is shooting up the charts? Who has fallen on (relatively) hard times?

Who is on the list? Lots of Nokia, partly because "income" includes stock options. Apparently last year when the stock was doing well, Nokia employees did a pretty clean sweep of the top places. Then there's Jaako Salovaara, the only person under 30 in the top 20.
And the guys from Instrumentarium who just got bought out by GE and got options.

And this being high-tech Finland, you can use the search machine on the website to tailor the list and rank the results.

Who are your local millionaires? Insert a town in Finland in the box "Kunta".

Who are the young guns making a fortune? Scroll down the box "Ika"

Where are the women? Choose "naisen" from the box "Sukupuoli"

Or just cut to the chase - insert a name in the box "Nimi" and find out how your boss is doing.

In addition to the list, Finnish journalists highlight a few other interesting and anamalous tax returns. One box in the Finnish printed newspaper had a box of salaries of all the union bosses. Why does the head of the teacher's union earn over 200,000 euros a year? How can he empathise with his comrades struggling with low pay?

And this being transparent Finland, the Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat did not hide that some of the wealthiest people on the capital list are involved with the Sanomat newspaper group.

But this is just what the mainstream newspapers do. There are also boutique publications that publish guides of everyone who earns over around 40,000 euros. They put a few stories in so they can argue it's news. But other than that, it's just one long list of everyone you know. And when there are only 5 million people in the country, and very very few foreigners, you know a lot of people. If you want your own copy, here's the link (alas, Finnish only) -
http://www.veroporssi.com/index.php

But hang on. We're in Finland, super-connected super wireless Finland. If you think newspapers and websites are yesterday, try SMS. You can send an SMS to the following number 16400 (yes, it works outside Finland +358 16400) with the text "vero first name last name". And lo, it will send you back the taxable income of that person in the last financial year.

So is this a good idea?

Well it works in Finland because of the Finns. Finland is not a country of keeping up with the Jones's. In fact, Finland is more a country of shame about obvious wealth - they want to appear as if they are behind the Jones's. One of the statistics the Finns are most proud of is the relatively small difference between the top 10% and the bottom 10% of the society.

Finnish taxes are high, and its tempting to avoid them. But people are shamed into paying tax. Do you really think it's a coincidence that Jorma Ollilla, Nokia CEO, knowing he will be published at the top of the list every year, pays the full whack of 60% tax? If you don't pay tax, not only will the tax office be after you. Everyone knows you haven't paid your fair share. Everyone knows. Your colleagues at work, your family, your neighbours, your kid's schoolteacher, the guy who serves you coffee in your favourite coffee shop. Try living with that.

Ethical value metrics

This metric reflects the expected increase in universal entropy caused by the existence of an organism over the future course of the universe compared to the organism not existing (or being killed, if that is the question). Since this is usually uncomputable due to our inability to predict the deep future in this way, we might (a) do some sort of future discounting or modify the metric to (b) only include the entropy increase of the universe for the expected duration of the organisms life.

This metric ("m") is natural in several ways:

let A and B be individuals. Let everything else be equal between the individuals unless otherwise stated and let us use the (b) metric unless otherwise stated. Then the metric is natural is the sense that:

1) if A lives longer than B, then m(A)>m(B)
2) if A does more work / consumes more energy than B, without stealing it from a more efficient consumer then m(A)>m(B)
3) (if we're counting descendents too) if A has more offsping than B then m(A)>m(B)
4) if A is bigger than B then generally 2) is implied
5) if A does not kill capriciously, then m(A)>m(B)
6) if A recycles waste and uses the extra energy then m(A)>m(B)
7) if A does not "burn down the forests" without what most people consider good cause, then m(A)>m(B)
8) descendents set up solar panels on mars or otherwise tap new
energy sources: then m(A)>m(B)
9) descendents spread out geographically, otherwise act the same: then m(A)>m(B)

Laughter

Laughter is fear and relief. Fear is all around. Every step is conditioned by the fear of falling. It is the relief from primitive anxiety and alarm responses that give rise to laughter. The release of the breath that wasn't needed. That sudden surprise rendered harmless by higher perception. Wonder, when accompanied by the expression of laughter is the unknown and fearful transformed. A transformation by subconscious brain functions typically of sub second duration. A transformation that takes the unknown and therefore possibly lethal and yields up the unknown and harmless to observe. Something to be explored, understood and remembered by wide eyed curiosity. Those eyes wide to suck in the world and a memory hungry for its details. A psychological and physiological stance that makes the unknown known. A state of maximal observational learning.

Doing the Mont Park shuffle

He was clean shaven, 20 kilos heavier and one year older, but he was still Antony. The last time we met his slender build and long orange hair & beard cast him as a modern Celtic Jesus. The last time we met he believed he could see dark matter and emit ultra violet rays. The last time we met he had cursed my evil heart and run off into the night. He was my oldest friend in Australia and now found himself in the East Ringwood mental health repatriation centre.

One year ago I had received a phone call from Sydney where Antony was visiting his sister. "Julian," he said, "I want to come and see you. I want to talk about to you about Quantum Mechanics,". That's the way he said it. Quantum Mechanics.

I had met Antony when I was 14 when we were both in "hell", a school in rural Victoria and one of 37 I'd attended on during my itinerant minstrel childhood. We were bright sensitive kids who didn't fit into the dominant subculture and feircely castigated those who did as iredeemable boneheads.

This unwillingness to accept the authority of a peer group considered risible was not appreciated. I was quick to anger and brutal statements such as "You're a bunch of mindless apes out of Lord of the Flies" when faced with standover tactics were enough to ensure I got into a series of extreme fights and I wasn't sorry to leave when presented with the dental bills of my tormentors.

Antony fared better. He wasn't new and had a social deftness that allowed him to side step and keep his contempt hidden where mine exuded from every pore. ``What is the most noble emotion Julian?'' he asked one day. ``Curiosity,'' I said after some thought. ``No,''. he said, ``Anger.''


My journal from our last meeting contains the following entry:

Antony arrives from Sydney with girl in toe. A' Mid-length hair and beard, both carrot red. A' decked out in hippy attire. Strong contrast to previous 'tough man' image. Newage fruitiness is now all consuming. A' attempting to dominate J' [brother]. A' can see "dark matter", emit UV rays, is a 15th (3*5) plane yogi, 27th dan Kung Foo Spirit Master. A' casts a voodoo spell "of death" on Michael B. by "cutting the throat" of my ceramic goose. A' clearly suffering some type of schizophrenia. V. poor reality testing and is of unstable affect. Poor reality testing fuelled by reading of Calos Castenida, occult books, etc. Much worse compared to last observation circa 18 months ago, but perhaps madness (then) was concealed as hypochondria. Situation v. sad. Believe A' will be in mad house or dead within 5 years and tell him so... ...A' lucid but intensely verbalising his theories / religious wank. I try to snare A's delusions. He becomes aggressive and frightened, accusing me of "psychotronically raping" girl from last night. I push him further. He disavows my evil heart and flees into the night.
But now he was at the East Ringwood mental health repatriation centre. His smile was shaky but characteristic. His physical edges rounded off by weight gain and his imagination dulled by anti-psychotics. His limbs and jaw gently shuddered with some frequency. He still had his classical guitar and chemistry books. His sensitivity and insight were not completely gone. His diagnosis was paranoid schizophrenia with co-morbid depression. The etiology (cause) of onset probably his drug synthesis experiments combined with genetic susceptibility. His prognosis unknown.

In his schizophrenic state he'd had phrases for the most subtle feelings. He had challenged me to deny the reality of 'psyhic vampires' -- those people look at you a certain way, trying to suck out your soul. But I found myself stumbling. There were such people and psychic vampires was a good phrase for them. He'd managed to push internal feeling onto external perception and use the change in perception to name the phenomena. But he'd turned up his gain so much feedback was breaking out everywhere. During his schizophrenic state he'd given me a gold metallic card and said with great earnestness ``Julian. I think the fine lines on this card are picking up neutrinos from the 4-5 helium cycle in the Sun. I'm sure it's getting heavier. Please take it to the Dept of Physics to be weighed''.

What delicacy there is in setting the controls on the amplifier of a human being. In the right context the tiny energy carried by the snap of a distant twig must be sufficient to cause immediate flight and a billion fold liberation of energy. An optimally perceptive brain must always be near the critical point of activing in response to its own internal noise.

When I asked about the cause of his shaking, suggesting a dopamine antagonist, he said ``No. It's one of the other anti-psychotics. If you look closely you'll notice a number of people around here acting the same way. Julian... we're all doing the Mont Park shuffle''.

Don't need a weather man to know which way the wind blows

When writing I like to extremise my perceptions inorder to give them clarity. If a weather cock's tail is long, you know which way the wind is blowing. A shorter tail is more ambiguous and no tail at all is like hippies saying "energy" -- could be anything. Well, you might argue, "If there are ambiguities in reality there should be ambiguities in its description", for even in the strongest southern gale there are swirling vortices all around. Yes, but these are second order effects. It is the weather cock's tail alone that gives the sailer his direction.

-Runaway consumerism explains the Fermi Paradox.

What do guitars, lollies, lipstick, tamagotchis, padded bras, pornography, movies, opium, Ever Quest, and 98% of any Australian newspaper in common? They are all technologies of emmotional manipulation which distort our perceptions for the benefit of their masters. Language centres in our neocortex may claim to "know" they are fake, but these words only feebly suppress those primitive areas of the brain which give rise to our feelings, colour our memories and command our attention. These non-verbal processing regions of the brain have not evolved to deal such sensory sophistry. For them, sensing is believing.

Hence the feelings in a young woman's breast buffeted by the flashing lights and impossibly sonorous tones of the amplified rock star; master of a 20 KiloWatt Adam's apple and by inference a super man having the chest cavity of God. Hence the dilated pupil of a man glancing at skin tone pigments on matted wood fibres, a pattern of vision that once meant love was not only in the air but ready and willing, prostrate on the ground. Hence the wariness of the horror movie attendee when returning home and opening the door of what was, and infact still is, a pefectlty innocent closet. Hence understanding Neighbors instead of neighbors and having Friends instead of friends. Hence the poker machine addict. Hence the dramatic rise in the economic take of powerful industries built around using advances in technology to stuff our heads with false feelings and memories. Not content to be zero sum, in exchange for our wealth and time these industries generally leave us less able to function by decalibrating our emotional and intellectual repore with reality.

"But, I like it you cold hearted Lutheran, you Stoic, you stone mason, you Zeno loving stick in the mud!". Well naturally, since the whole game is to manipulate your feelings, it is not suprising that you have positive associations about your perceptual opium, is is, after all, what keeps you going back to your dealer.

Such deceptions, previously known as "Art", as in "Artifice" or "Artful" have a long history of successful human parasitation. But the industrial control of and rapid advances in the ability to successfully falsify sense data has no historical analog. I have previously argued that a possible explanation for the Fermi Paradox (why don't there seem to be any aliens, dude) is the existence of a developmental ceiling created by technological advances flowing into the perceptual manipulation industry till it gobbles up through diversion and wealth destruction all economic growth.

The credulous will not inherit the earth, but they'll get to play a game where they do. A beautiful reality and a beautiful dream.

Professions

What really seems to seperate blue-collar work from the professions is that the latter involves manipulation of human perception. The result being that long term success is more about how well you relate to other people than how well you can perform technically. There's no simple performance metric for doctors, lawyers, academics or businessmen; these are professions of perception control and not only the first two prey on inducing hopes and fears.

Many worlds

The measurement paradox seems to be going away as people have filled in the details on many worlds / environmental decoherence. This hasn't come from arm chair philosophising so much as out of real modeling problems from quantum computation. I don't understand this well enough yet to say anything meaningful, but my five second take is that it does for the measurement problem what entropy does for the arrow of time and in much the same way; by denying an independent dimension to the phenomenon and instead extrapolating it from the behavior of a statistically large ensemble. The discussion is not purely philosophical, because you need something like this if you want to think usefully about the behavior of nano sized "measurement" devices. It's not that many worlds predicts different results to Copenhagen, but that you can't think about some quantum computation problems easily enough with Copenhagen to be able to make a prediction at all. And here I give an analogy: All measurements are rational numbers but physics is full of complex numbers. All you ever do in physics is connect, through computers and brains one rational number (settings on an experiment) to another (results of a measurement). So why is physics full of complex numbers? Because they permit us to out think those too pure to use them and here follows the analogy; by the time any measurement gets into my brain it is in a form that satisfies Copenhagen since it has interacted with a macro ensemble (apparatus and my flesh) and likewise the setup of any macro experiment satisfies Copenhagen. But in the middle we may use any consistent trick that aids our thinking. The "tricks" are as real as their power to produce predictions consonant with described reality, for this, in some sense is the definition of understanding.

Pit and pendulum

Intelligence and sadness may sometimes be correlated, but it seems far more in the application than in the possession for while the mind is a rope to pull one out of the pit and those in it sometimes show it to desperate degree once free and on the surface the same rope can also scale heights of love and accomplishment invisible from the narrow confines below.

Female mathematics

Mathematics is a systemization of communicable human thought created by brain architectures that have male-type spacial abilities and extremised by the extremes within that group. Extreme female brain architectures would create a different sort of mathematics. It won't be created by the females currently in mathematics because they need a male type brain to thrive in the existing mathematical world.
Perhaps a good cognitive neuroscientist will do it for them.

Oxford without the punting

Today, outside, there's a code-red storm raging. The little ANU "lets-be-like Oxford without the punting" creek is now a torrent of leaves and ducks and mud. The eight white stepping stones I skipped over this morning are nowhere to be seen and the only sign of them is a sign --- "Please be careful when crossing on stepping stones".

Where there were once only ducks and swamphens there is now a pelican with beady eyes and an expectant smile.

I'm writing from the AV desk of an abandoned lecture theatre in the MCC building. This theatre has a piano. The piano is nice and I come in here early some mornings to emerse myself --- in myself. The theatre lights are movement sensitive, but not piano sensitive, so after after five minutes the lights wink out and there's just me, the tinkling of the keys, the howls of the wind and now and then the memory of some girl's ivory curves.

Craftier deceptions

Physics can take you out of yourself. Once you realise that there is no place where you end and the rest of a vast expanse of time and space begin, it becomes difficult, very difficult, to see why one should spend time absorbing the latest adhoc false reality willed by human beings. But this is mostly putting effect before cause, for surely it is the character trait of a physcist, bedded into flesh at a young age that leads to a desire to see the world stripped bare and engage a future of exchanging CAN for IS, or at least, so I sometimes think, requiring a much craftier deception.