Twitter Marginalia

Re: Information engine operates with nearly perfect efficiency

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Ha. This type of energy efficiency reminds me of the snow that has been on my neighbors' rooftop solar cells for the past several days... Fallacy of composition obvious to all but the purblind. The second law is truly overcome with the nonlinear advancement in this series of technological advancements: wood burning, coal, oil and natural gas, nuclear fission, nuclear fusion, matter- anti matter reactions... yet to be determined. In other words human creativity breaks the bounds of entropy. But this is not mere passive information.

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-01-efficiency.html#jCp

Re: New Year Greeting by Helga Zepp-LaRouche (2018)

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As we know the "casino economy" takes fictitious monetary values as real in which stock markets and "full employment" are the chips won at the roulette wheel. (Vast estates and golf courses are the outward trappings of this sort of nominal success.) This is one great vulnerability of Trump & co.: the lack of understanding that economics is not a "zero sum game," albeit with some few good impulses but limited like the space program and mild infrastructure program.

The other major vulnerability: the quagmire of Mideast "great game" run as a catspaw by the Deep State/London/Wall St "axis of evil" to suffocate any tendency for Trump to truly escape geopolitics. (With a dose of North Korea "yellow peril" on the side.) Add to that the Ukrainian arms deal engineered by the Republican neo-cons like Lindsey Graham and we have a Trump presidency being hacked to death by a thousand cuts.

Perhaps the only hope is that the Deep State has so over played their hand in their transparently vicious campaign to take down Trump's naive recognition that the United States should not be entangled in endless "humanitarian" wars that the world will come out the other side in spite of all these salient deficiencies. Now that would be a happy new year.

Re: How chromosomes 'cheat' for the chance to get into an egg

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Finding evidence for a kind of choice among centromeres at this functional resolution is indicative of a condition of asymmetry inherent in the biosphere itself. In fact, asymmetry is a crucial property throughout all three domains that the Ukrainian scientist Vladimir Vernadsky identified: the Lithosphere, Biosphere, and Noosphere.

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-11-chromosomes-chance-egg.html#jCp

Re: Harvey Weinstein, Hollywood’s Oldest Horror

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It's not just Hollywood, it's the supposed liberal counterculture. Take the 60s rock songs like the Rolling Stones "Under My thumb" or Beatles "Run for Your Life" & today's Rap "lyrics." This ain't freedom they are celebrating, it's all leftist toxic BS. 
It is part and parcel of a "little me" attitude against promoting an intellectual mission for society such as the space program. Go back to "turn on, tune in, drop out" MK-Ultra CIA Congress of Cultural Freedom and you have the agenda of the would be liberal elite.

Re: Researchers uncover our brain's filing system for storing experiences

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The conceptional organization of mental processes is embedded in one's particular worldview, for better or worse. Physical correlatives of such orderings by necessity arise from that same organization except in the case of traumatic injury or disease.

The Deliberate Destruction of Rationality

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The CIA projects called The Congress of Cultural Freedom created modern art as worship of the irrational. MKULTRA popularized LSD. We are witnessing now a world driven mad through the manipulations of evil geopolitics. China had it's cultural revolution, yet it is now leading the world toward a rational alternative economic development policy called One Belt One Road. If the US is to survive we will join.

Re: SpaceX's Musk unveils plan to reach Mars by 2022

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Moon and Mars colonization which is shown now to be feasible in lava tubes that are shielded from radiation will be accomplished only as part of a new international monetary system replacing the trillions of dollars in uncollectable exotic "derivatives" debt instruments created by the City of London and Wall Street. Only then may nations come together in a concerted effort for space colonization and fusion energy rocket engines and power production. This new system would include financing for other grand projects such as maglev rails, water diversion, desalination and flood control.

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-09-spacex-musk-unveils-mars.html#jCp

Re: Stephen Hawking Now A Doomsday Prophet

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This proves Hawking is as crazy as ... well... his ego ideal: Isaac Newton. Sir Isaac predicted from his studies of numerology he imagined were hidden in the Bible that the world would end in the Apocalypse in 2060... You cannot make this stuff up. Are they all demented?

http://thingumbobesquire.blogspot.com/2012/01/newtons-alchemy-apologists-unmasked.html

Re: New model reveals possibility of pumping antibiotics into bacteria

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An excellent example of a research breakthrough that exhibits that the essence of hypothesis formulation is deliberately and systematically the challenge of previously accepted assumptions: "I'm actually going to teach this paper in our intro graduate course because it's such a good story of how having a model in your head can limit your thinking and experiments and you really miss important things." Contrary to Newton's silly "Hypothesis non fingo."

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-11-reveals-possibility-antibiotics-bacteria.html#jCp

Re: Entanglement is an inevitable feature of reality

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A further corollary of this theory would be that since from the retrodictive classical standpoint quantum non local entanglement necessarily infers irrationality, all non classical theories must be irrational. (Like belief in Einsteinian spooks for example.) Therefore these eminent theorists are as nuts as the day is long, QED, nincompoopis. See Jonathan Swift'S tale of Laputa for an almost clairvoyant summary of the situation.

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-09-entanglement-inevitable-feature-reality.html#jCp

Re: Galaxy clusters offer clues to dark matter and dark energy

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The most powerful force in the universe is not entropy. It is not even a purely physical force... It is the uniquely human creative drive to do the good for the benefit of unborn generations.This is why "artificial intelligence' is a fraud and why humanity must revolutionize its practice to continuously inhabit and conquer "outer space."

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-08-galaxy-clusters-clues-dark-energy.html#jCp

Re: Scientists crack mystery of the luckless apostles of Paris

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The anarchy of the sans culottes also targeted science in France (many of whom were collaborators of Benjamin Franklin) as well as the hero of the American revolution General LaFayette. As Friedrich Schiller wrote a great moment had met a small people.


Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-08-scientists-mystery-luckless-apostles-paris.html#jCp

Re: Optimization for self-production may explain mysterious features of the ribo

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This study falls in line with the classical principle of biospheric optimization and growth that living systems taken as a whole exhibit the quality of least action for maximum development potential.

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-07-optimization-self-production-mysterious-features-ribosome.html#jCp

Re: Vortex photons from electrons in circular motion

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This vortex photon phenomenon is characteristic of propagation of a rotational shock wave field as opposed to spherical radiation. http://thingumbob...toroidal

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-07-vortex-photons-electrons-circular-motion.html#jCp

Re: Epigenetics between the generations

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See Leibniz' theory of pre-established harmony. There are different modes of this dynamic harmony for each of the following domains as defined by Vernadsky: lithosphere, biosphere or noosphere. Although for the noosphere, i.e. the realm of human creative cognition, harmony with the other inter-related spheres depends upon scientific and artistic progress or development. This is entirely willful activity unlike in the other two.

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-07-epigenetics-inherit-genes.html?utm_source=nwletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=daily-nwletter

Re: Adventures in acoustic cosmology

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Contrary to this line of thinking, classical music has already achieved a harmony, if you will, between music and science. But the link is the biophysics of the human singing voice and well tempered tuning. The registers of the voice are the basis for the musical scales and keys for classical composition. The epitome of this relationship appears in the works of J.S. Bach. Musical instrumentation extends and enhances this lawful interrelationship. This was furthered by the compositions of Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms and their epigones. 

In the mid to late nineteenth and twentieth centuries arbitrary melodic chromaticism and defiance of this lawfulness began to hold sway with such anti-well tempored inventions as the twelve tone row. However, this does not negate the true science of well tempering.


Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-07-adventures-acoustic-cosmology.html#jCp

Re: Newly-discovered plant enzymes open the door to novel compound production

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"It looks as though plants have independently arrived at their own way of making these molecules; they have 'worked it out for themselves'."

Excellent example of parallel vectored evolution as opposed to Darwinian random mutation. There exists a natural and necessary harmonic dynamism that Leibniz called pre-established harmony.

https://phys.org/news/2017-07-newly-discovered-enzymes-door-compound-production.html

Re: Vladimir Putin: A Suitor Spurned

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"It’s a view with which I very much concur: American imperialism is an aberration, a radical deviation from the course set for us by the Founders of this country, and completely out of character for the overwhelming majority of the American people, who just want to live in peace."

The reality is that the United States constitution was created to the end of making economically possible vast "internal improvements" by the faction associated with Alexander Hamilton, who was at loggerheads with the pro slavery expansionist and pro sans culotte faction of Thomas Jefferson. It was necessary to prevent the British Empire imperialism from successfully taking America back due to the lack of such an economic mission under the Articles of Confederation.

The geopolitical "great game" has always been to "turn" the United States into the enforcer of a rotting financial empire based upon loot. We have been engaged in "continuous wars" due to the Anglophilic "Eastern Establishment's" grip on both political parties starting with Korea, Viet Nam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, etc.

27th Jun 2017 - Re: One billion suns: World's brightest laser sparks new behavior in light

This type of research is precisely what should be promoted as propelling breakthroughs in science. I.e., extreme conditions in the physical space-time manifold bring about anomalous behavior that can be applied to greater control over such processes thus benefiting humanity. That should always clarify an essential path for development.

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-06-billion-suns-world-brightest-laser.html#jCp

Re: Neuron transistor behaves like a brain neuron

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'The human brain has tens of billions of neurons, and they are constantly performing weighted summation and threshold functions many times per second that together control all of our thoughts and actions.' 

This statement is, of course, sententious nonsense, but unfortunately par for the course in the domain of "the brain is a computer" idiocy.



https://phys.org/news/2017-06-neuron-transistor-brain.html?utm_source=nwletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=daily-nwletter

Re: Maureen Dowd -- "Comey and Trump, the G-Man vs. the Mob Boss"

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Ha! What unmitigated gall. The Russians "hacking" the US election is a serious "matter?" You are aware Ms. Dowd that the George "Open" Soros State Department spent billions on hacking elections in the name of democracy all over the globe? But that is perfectly fine of course because to paraphrase Richard Nixon- when the US does it it is democracy...

Re: Humans rely more on 'inferred' visual objects than 'real' ones

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This is reminiscent of the geometry conformal mapping that was perfected by Gauss and his collaborators in the 19th century. The human brain is designed for this species of mapping in its unique geometry. All this chatter about information is really a trendy computer program comparison that is unfortunately viral these days.

Read more at: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-05-humans-inferred-visual-real.html#jCp

Reimann vs. Connectionist Nonsense

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Sigh... Another tired connectionist type model. The real mathematics that is germane here is Riemann surfaces whereby a protein may function as a singular branch-point to a surface function upon an N dimensional manifold: http://thingumbob...fic.html

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-03-math-bodiesand-diseases.html#jCp

"The bottom line is that we have some good ideas (ATLAS, infrared surveys, ESA's all-sky survey), and we just need to spend the money and roll these out. But to find the smallest objects — 30 to 50 meters in size — we are talking of the order of a billion dollars to do it right," said Timothy Spahr, director of the Minor Planet Center at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-02-tycoon-couple-mars.html#jCp

Oligarchies and tyrants have dreamed of this kind of control for centuries on end. And now we are supposed to volunteer to submit to shackles of the irrational and excessive whims of the crowd. The whole reason that we are not a "pure" democracy but rather a constitutional democratic republic is virtually unknown to so called techies... 
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324503204578318462215991802.html?mod=WSJ_article_comments&cb=logged0.4196033328771591#articleTabs=comments

Subjecting humans to cosmic rays' deleterious effects, etc. of a prolonged trip to Mars via chemical propulsion is unnecessary cruel and unusual punishment. Better to revive Project Orion with fusion propulsion and solve the shielding problem for astronauts first. In the meantime, so far as I have heard, robots usually don't complain about being pinged a bit on the slow slog to Mars.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2415783,00.asp

Very good, but incomplete. Correct as to Hamilton and Lincoln. What you have left out is the machinations of Wall St speculators in collusion with the slave states. Aaron Burr, who fraudulently founded the Bank of Manhattan schooled Andrew Jackson's controller Martin Van Buren's Democrats in taking down the Bank of the United States founded by Hamilton.

This was done by populist appeals against big banks. See the writings of John Quincy Adams for details.

Today's derivatives speculators have formed a similar alliance with so called Democrats like Obama and Geithner to protect themselves as too big to fail when they are obviously otherwise hopelessly bankrupt. So these facilitators have spent literally trillions to bail out Wall St, all the while making believe they are for the little guy.
http://www.salon.com/2013/02/19/southern_poverty_pimps/

"Rock philosopher Tom Petty" ?? This is the most laughable characterization I have seen for quite some time. So I suppose the rest of the article is equally tongue in cheek, though I really don't have the intestinal fortitude to read it as I might easily split a gut...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/who-had-the-worst-week-in-washington-defense-secretary-nominee-chuck-hagel/2013/02/15/e011fd2e-7795-11e2-95e4-6148e45d7adb_allComments.html?ctab=all_&

Attention span (and attention directedness) is determined by factors that are outside the realm of biophysics per se. These factors have to do with cognitive resonance with idea content. This is what fundamentally differentiates mere physical brain functions from the culturally determined category of mind. In this regard, attention can be maintained on appropriately defined subject matter across generations.

Read more at: http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-02-memories-brain-streaks-individual-behaviour.html#jCp

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-27/the-fed-is-more-out-of-it-than-you-thought-it-was.html " And restoring basic accountability is hard when the financial system is seen as too fragile to tolerate criminal investigations of banks, as with HSBC Holdings Plc (HSBA) avoiding criminal charges for drug-cartel money laundering because of the bank’s too-big-to-fail status." 

So I guess the logic here goes something like this: "the condition of the godfather is fragile and yous guys need to keep him on life support for your own good...Or else!"

We are currently striving to establish the means to prevent collisions with comets, etc. But this type of potential event (and worse,) rare though it is, certainly would seem to merit some consideration regarding safeguarding life.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-01-8th-century-gamma-ray-irradiated.html#jCp

Unless we have inertial confinement fusion propulsion and shielding from cosmic rays, a manned mission to Mars is simply nonsensical and inhumane.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-01-simulated-mission-mars-success-hinges.html#jCp

Re: Less life: Limited phosphorus recycling suppressed early Earth's biosphere

The recent work "Biomass recycling and Earth’s early phosphorus cycle" is precisely correct. The throughput energy density of phosphorus in the biosphere directly effects the potential for ATP synthase, the molecular engine of life, to power evolution. This energy density throughput (as identified by Lyndon LaRouche and co-thinkers, myself included) is the critical component for human economic activity as well. The difference is that for the human economy the measure of energy density throughput is of a higher Cantorian transfinite order that subsumes previous technologies. For example, energy derived from wood burning subsumed by coal, then oil, natural gas, nuclear fission. The next step in this sequence is nuclear fusion, and beyond that matter-anti-matter reactions.

On the down side we have the entropic philosophy of the doomsayers "green" agenda. It assumes falsely that that is only so much stuff on our planet so therefore we must "invest" in "renewables." This is mad and criminally so. It is relegating future generations to increasing levels of poverty both economically and culturally. Thus we have today's opioid addiction crisis. 

The principle of Cantorian transfinite subsumption goes back to Nicholas of Cusa and his collaborators in the Florentine renaissance (which Cantor readily admitted.) However, the foundation of this quality of noesis can be found in Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. If good reader you will overcome your silly adopted "modernist" assumptions about the separation of left brain/right brain hermetically distinct categories of science versus art, then you will conceive that great poetry going back to Plato's dialogues is science. And as Dante quite rightly demonstrated that even in the very uttermost depths of hell such as we have ravaging our society there always exists an ordered pathway out of that hideous cave toward the light. This is the pre-established dynamic harmony Leibniz propounded. 

Contrary to the childish science fiction epigones of H.G. Wells, the "space age" by necessity, as Ibn Sina so succinctly argued in his proof of the "Necessary Existent," is the common ennobling destiny of humanity. Only then will we put away our infantile playthings of yesteryear and enter into a new self reflective transfinite domain of that which Dante and Cusa profoundly depicted as the Vision of God.

Update: this excellent research shows the unique role of fungi in producing soluble phosphorus and compares differing possible rates of its throughput. 

The birth of a new protein and the genius of Leibniz

Here is a remarkable insight from one of the authors of the paper "Foldability of a Natural De Novo Evolved Protein": "Not having emerged as this glorious work of art makes it more believable that these protein-coding genes are popping up out of the genetic region between genes," Cordes said. "I want to know where things come from in life - how life creates novelty, how evolution creates novelty."

Add this innate creative capacity to Leibniz' perspective of lower monads without windows upon the universe. At that point you have something that is very much like artistic composition where apparently fixed elements of musical intervals or rhythmic versification allow an infinite array of potential de novo experiments establishing harmony. This is what Leibniz meant by pre-established harmony as the best of all possible worlds.





Possible shapes for the yeast protein Bsc4 that the computer algorithm QUARK predicted using only the protein’s amino acid sequences. (Image: Matthew Cordes, using UCSF Chimera molecular graphics package)

Kepler's Method is Alive and Well

The situation with dark matter and dark energy that astronomy confronts today is eerily reminiscent of Ptolemaic epicycles. Upon founding the mission for the moon at NASA John Kennedy remarked "The greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorance unfolds."

What was the method that allowed Kepler to overcome the roadblock along the pathway toward resolution of the ordering of planetary orbits? He pronounced that method openly and forthrightly. The principle of the universal composition must be comprehensible to humanity. That is, there must be a higher order that would allow coherence to seemingly random pathways that celestial bodies take. At first he envisioned an ordering subsumed by the geometrical system of embedded regular Platonic solids. This bold hypothesis derives from Kepler's insistence that any planetary order must not be algebraic but constructive. Which is to say that the scheme of the composition of the universe could not be merely arbitrary but by necessity must be well reasoned. 

The harmonic elliptical function that Kepler next hypothesized also adumbrated the very same idea of a lawful higher ordering subsuming universal motion of matter. For elliptical conic sections are geometrically projective. In its own way this elliptical principle is a type of relativity. And it is no coincidence that the same method of strictly basing any hypothesis upon geometrical analysis in fact did underlie Einstein's breakthroughs. The four dimensional complex geometry that Einstein utilized was made possible by Gauss and Riemann's advancements. 

Firstly, Gauss resolved the whole matter of apparent universal cyclical randomness with his grand opus on higher arithmetic. Which is to say that at the granular level of comparative relative celestial motion a higher principle of cyclic remainders or higher arithmetic  is necessary by the very composition of substance. 

Next Riemann boldly established whole new types of geometrical projection in his dissertation on the hypotheses underlying the foundations of geometry and in his work on pressure shock waves. First Riemann showed that dimensionality was analogically projective from n + 1 dimensions to n dimensions.  This allowed Einstein to suppose that time itself was quasi dimensional as the fourth dimension. (As I showed earlier, this assumption in a way was already given birth by Kepler's elliptical principle which itself stood outside of time by subsumption.) Just as importantly for Einstein was Riemann's development of the ordering of universal curvature. (This was foreshadowed also by Gauss as Riemann admitted.) 

Further, it has been my lifelong contention that Riemann's revolutionary reworking of geometry has much more to bequeath to today's scientific problems. His branch point surface function itself  is evidently a coherent pathway toward establishing a biophysical type of ordering. Riemann himself deeply delved into this realm with his paper on the mechanics of the ear. We see in research everywhere that at the very small biophysical order a protein or some other biotic monad or branch point singularity has a manifold of functions completely in line with the sheaves of functional space that Riemann developed. 

In this way, the principle of projective relativity takes another non linear step from the merely inert physical dead matter to the living realm. In the very same way that for instance we witness microtubules functioning communicatively biophysically, may we not hypothesize that intergalactic dust lanes might be a sort of macrotubule for the creation of star systems? It is a question that goes directly back to Kepler's method that instead of the frankly dreadful assumption that mere randomness underlies all motion in physics in the small and large, living systems and noetic systems must subsume from a higher order that which appears to the senses. Or as Kepler would have it, the mind of the Composer of universal substance

Beauty's Secret Snare

What secrets has thou kept these many years
Upon a mountain top in China
Lovely Iris, from humanity's prying eyes?
Though beauty as the dawn's sweet light does bathe
Your winsome hues in rainbow petals grace:
Sweet sacrifice of nectar
You now make with measured guile.
For rudely mating sawflies
Entranced to merely dine
Yet leave untouched both stigma and stamen
For the sake of your flower progeny
That yet will delight with blues and purples
Up in the rarefied heights
New generations of friend and foe alike.

By Kogo (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 

(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

The Universal Relative Process of Becoming

Nicholas of Cusa over half a millennium ago propounded a principle that should have governed scientific inquiry to this day. He called it learned ignorance or docta ignorantia. To restate this: the principle is that as humanity discovers successive breakthroughs regarding the organizational constitution of the physical, biophysical and psychological functioning of our universe, we paradoxically discover that we are just as far if not farther from understanding what lies beyond.

This train of thought is based upon a methodology of Platonic dialog. It is a rigorous determination regarding the ontology of the power of the infinite process of becoming. For instance, how can we surmise that if humanity lifts our civilization off this planet we can be confident that we will collectively discover new sources of energy to propel us forward? (A progressive energetic series of fission, fusion, matter-anti-matter, etc.) This is just because we can hypothesize that the potential entirety of human history is concomitant with this very infinite such power. To think otherwise is irrationally absurd.

And yet society has been in the throes of such "thinking" over the ages. The magical belief in the power of a pantheon of immortals who arbitrarily rule over human affairs is unfortunately prevalent in the tide of history to date. It is synonymous with the infantile worship of money for instance: the magic of the marketplace. It is the equivalent of the belief in renewable energy sources as somehow constituting progress rather than regress -- i.e. that there is only so much stuff to go around on this lifeboat earth.

It is nearly miraculous that since we have been imprisoned intellectually by such infantile poppycock that we have somehow not managed to blow our whole planet to smithereens several times over. Which indeed is as close as I can come to an otherwise impossible proof that the continuing process of creation is harmonically composed of what can only be described as a nurturing or loving governance. Never has the choice of mutual development of nations versus destruction been more stark.

Human Brain Surface Topology

If one were to perform a normal conformal mapping of the surface of the human brain to a Gaussian unit sphere, there would be the equivalent of a Riemannian surface function that has a multiplex sheath of sheets. This mapping is on the complex mathematical domain and counts every bit as much for the human brain's quality as the intricate axonal branching that supposedly carry "information." Whatever that is...

Nonlinear discontinuities are the characteristics of substance

The absolute and unbridgeable separation among the realms of the non living, biophysical and human creativity points to the idea that rather than assuming that substance is merely located within those boundaries, substance is rather the movement from one to another.

The paradox of humanity's forever finite yet evolving knowledge of such infinitely powerful sources of universal creation rightfully situates the solution to the current baleful consequences of the false ideologies of geopolitics and limited resources.

For there can be no possible limits to human technological progress which revolutionizes the very definition of what constitutes a resource. The proof of this potential can only be grasped negatively in the same way that the ironic nature of substance is addressed above. While we as a species are constrained to operating within the confines of existing modes of sustenance, it is only when the necessary orientation of discovery permeates our science and art that we truly exhibit our whole and uniquely creative nature.

What Prevents Science from Achieving Accelerated Breakthroughs

The edifice of assumptions regarding the DNA code as the program that is determinate for life is fatally flawed. The reality is that life is of a higher order of transfinite than the non living. Likewise human creative reason is of a higher such order than the domain of lower life forms. The question is why do the vast majority of scientists not know what transfinite ordering is?

Edgar Allan Poe, whence the name of this blog, in his Eureka presaged this lack of epistemological clarity thus:

"Now, my dear friend," continues the letter-writer, "it cannot be maintained that by the crawling system, exclusively adopted, men would arrive at the maximum amount of truth, even in any long series of ages; for the repression of imagination was an evil not to be counterbalanced even by absolute certainty in the snail processes. But their certainty was very far from absolute. The error of our progenitors was quite analogous with that of the wiseacre who fancies he must necessarily see an object the more distinctly, the more closely he holds it to his eyes. They blinded themselves, too, with the impalpable, titillating Scotch snuff of detail; and thus the boasted facts of the Hog-ites were by no means always facts -- a point of little importance but for the assumption that they always were. The vital taint, however, in Baconianism -- its most lamentable fount of error -- lay in its tendency to throw power and consideration into the hands of merely perceptive men -- of those inter-Tritonic minnows, the microscopical savans -- the diggers and pedlers of minute facts, for the most part in physical science -- facts all of which they retailed at the same price upon the highway; their value depending, it was supposed, simply upon the fact of their fact, without reference to their applicability or inapplicability in the development of those ultimate and only legitimate facts, called Law.



"Than the persons" -- the letter goes on to say -- "than the persons thus suddenly elevated by the Hog-ian philosophy into a station for which they were unfitted -- thus transferred from the sculleries into the parlors of Science -- from its pantries into its pulpits -- than these individuals a more intolerant -- a more intolerable set of bigots and tyrants never existed on the face of the earth. Their creed, their text and their sermon were, alike, the one word 'fact' -- but, for the most part, even of this one word, they knew not even the meaning. On those who ventured to disturb their facts with the view of putting them in order and to use, the disciples of Hog had no mercy whatever. All attempts at generalization were met at once by the words 'theoretical,' 'theory,' 'theorist' -- all thought, to be brief, was very properly resented as a personal affront to themselves. Cultivating the natural sciences to the exclusion of Metaphysics, the Mathematics, and Logic, many of these Bacon-engendered philosophers -- one-idead, one-sided and lame of a leg -- were more wretchedly helpless -- more miserably ignorant, in view of all the comprehensible objects of knowledge, than the veriest unlettered hind who proves that he knows something at least, in admitting that he knows absolutely nothing.



"Nor had our forefathers any better right to talk about certainty, when pursuing, in blind confidence, the a priori path of axioms, or of the Ram. At innumerable points this path was scarcely as straight as a ram's-horn. The simple truth is, that the Aristotelians erected their castles upon a basis far less reliable than air; for no such things as axioms ever existed or can possibly exist at all. This they must have been very blind, indeed, not to see, or at least to suspect; for, even in their own day, many of their long-admitted 'axioms' had been abandoned: -- 'ex nihilo nihil fit,' for example, and a 'thing cannot act where it is not,' and 'there cannot be antipodes,' and 'darkness cannot proceed from light.' These and numerous similar propositions formerly accepted, without hesitation, as axioms, or undeniable truths, were, even at the period of which I speak, seen to be altogether untenable: -- how absurd in these people, then, to persist in relying upon a basis, as immutable, whose mutability had become so repeatedly manifest!



"But, even through evidence afforded by themselves against themselves, it is easy to convict these a priori reasoners of the grossest unreason -- it is easy to show the futility -- the impalpability of their axioms in general. I have now lying before me" -- it will be observed that we still proceed with the letter -- "I have now lying before me a book printed about a thousand years ago. Pundit assures me that it is decidedly the cleverest ancient work on its topic, which is 'Logic.' The author, who was much esteemed in his day, was one Miller or Mill; and we find it recorded of him, as a point of some importance, that he rode a mill-horse whom he called Jeremy Bentham: -- but let us glance at the volume itself!



"Ah! -- 'Ability or inability to conceive,' says Mr. Mill very properly, 'is in no case to be received as a criterion of axiomatic truth.' Now, that this is a palpable truism no one in his senses will deny. Not to admit the proposition, is to insinuate a charge of variability in Truth itself, whose very title is a synonym of the Steadfast. If ability to conceive be taken as a criterion of Truth, then a truth to David Hume would very seldom be a truth to Joe; and ninety-nine hundredths of what is undeniable in Heaven would be demonstrable falsity upon Earth. The proposition of Mr. Mill, then, is sustained. I will not grant it to be an axiom; and this merely because I am showing that no axioms exist; but, with a distinction which could not have been cavilled at even by Mr. Mill himself, I am ready to grant that, if an axiom there be, then the proposition of which we speak has the fullest right to be considered an axiom -- that no more absolute axiom is -- and, consequently, that any subsequent proposition which shall conflict with this one primarily advanced, must be either a falsity in itself -- that is to say no axiom -- or, if admitted axiomatic, must at once neutralize both itself and its predecessor.



"And now, by the logic of their own propounder, let us proceed to test any one of the axioms propounded. Let us give Mr. Mill the fairest of play. We will bring the point to no ordinary issue. We will select for investigation no common-place axiom -- no axiom of what, not the less preposterously because only impliedly, he terms his secondary class -- as if a positive truth by definition could be either more or less positively a truth: -- we will select, I say, no axiom of an unquestionability so questionable as is to be found in Euclid. We will not talk, for example, about such propositions as that two straight lines cannot enclose a space, or that the whole is greater than any one of its parts. We will afford the logician every advantage. We will come at once to a proposition which he regards as the acme of the unquestionable -- as the quintessence of axiomatic undeniability. Here it is: -- 'Contradictions cannot both be true -- that is, cannot coexist in nature.' Here Mr. Mill means, for instance, -- and I give the most forcible instance conceivable -- that a tree must be either a tree or not a tree -- that it cannot be at the same time a tree and not a tree: -- all which is quite reasonable of itself and will answer remarkably well as an axiom, until we bring it into collation with an axiom insisted upon a few pages before -- in other words -- words which I have previously employed -- until we test it by the logic of its own propounder. 'A tree,' Mr. Mill asserts, 'must be either a tree or not a tree.' Very well: -- and now let me ask him, why. To this little query there is but one response: -- I defy any man living to invent a second. The sole answer is this: -- 'Because we find it impossible to conceive that a tree can be anything else than a tree or not a tree.' This, I repeat, is Mr. Mill's sole answer: -- he will not pretend to suggest another: -- and yet, by his own showing, his answer is clearly no answer at all; for has he not already required us to admit, as an axiom, that ability or inability to conceive is in no case to be taken as a criterion of axiomatic truth? Thus all -- absolutely his argumentation is at sea without a rudder. Let it not be urged that an exception from the general rule is to be made, in cases where the 'impossibility to conceive' is so peculiarly great as when we are called upon to conceive a tree both a tree and not a tree. Let no attempt, I say, be made at urging this sotticism; for, in the first place, there are no degrees of 'impossibility,' and thus no one impossible conception can be more peculiarly impossible than another impossible conception: -- in the second place, Mr. Mill himself, no doubt after thorough deliberation, has most distinctly, and most rationally, excluded all opportunity for exception, by the emphasis of his proposition, that, in no case, is ability or inability to conceive, to be taken as a criterion of axiomatic truth: -- in the third place, even were exceptions admissible at all, it remains to be shown how any exception is admissible here. That a tree can be both a tree and not a tree, is an idea which the angels, or the devils, may entertain, and which no doubt many an earthly Bedlamite, or Transcendentalist, does.



"Now I do not quarrel with these ancients," continues the letter-writer, "so much on account of the transparent frivolity of their logic -- which, to be plain, was baseless, worthless and fantastic altogether -- as on account of their pompous and infatuate proscription of all other roads to Truth than the two narrow and crooked paths -- the one of creeping and the other of crawling -- to which, in their ignorant perversity, they have dared to confine the Soul -- the Soul which loves nothing so well as to soar in those regions of illimitable intuition which are utterly incognizant of 'path.'



"By the bye, my dear friend, is it not an evidence of the mental slavery entailed upon those bigoted people by their Hogs and Rams, that in spite of the eternal prating of their savans about roads to Truth, none of them fell, even by accident, into what we now so distinctly perceive to be the broadest, the straightest and most available of all mere roads -- the great thoroughfare -- the majestic highway of the Consistent? Is it not wonderful that they should have failed to deduce from the works of God the vitally momentous consideration that a perfect consistency can be nothing but an absolute truth? How plain -- how rapid our progress since the late announcement of this proposition! By its means, investigation has been taken out of the hands of the ground-moles, and given as a duty, rather than as a task, to the true -- to the only true thinkers -- to the generally-educated men of ardent imagination. These latter -- our Keplers -- our Laplaces -- 'speculate' -- 'theorize' -- these are the terms -- can you not fancy the shout of scorn with which they would be received by our progenitors, were it possible for them to be looking over my shoulders as I write? The Keplers, I repeat, speculate -- theorize -- and their theories are merely corrected -- reduced -- sifted -- cleared, little by little, of their chaff of inconsistency -- until at length there stands apparent an unencumbered Consistency -- a consistency which the most stolid admit -- because it is a consistency -- to be an absolute and unquestionable Truth.



"I have often thought, my friend, that it must have puzzled these dogmaticians of a thousand years ago, to determine, even, by which of their two boasted roads it is that the cryptographist attains the solution of the more complicated cyphers -- or by which of them Champollion guided mankind to those important and innumerable truths which, for so many centuries, have lain entombed amid the phonetical hieroglyphics of Egypt. In especial, would it not have given these bigots some trouble to determine by which of their two roads was reached the most momentous and sublime of their truths -- the truth -- the fact of gravitation? Newton deduced it from the laws of Kepler. Kepler admitted that these laws he guessed -- these laws whose investigation disclosed to the greatest of British astronomers that principle, the basis of all (existing) physical principle, in going behind which we enter at once the nebulous kingdom of Metaphysics. Yes! -- these vital laws Kepler guessed -- that it is to say, he imagined them. Had he been asked to point out either the de ductive or in ductive route by which he attained them, his reply might have been -- 'I know nothing about routes -- but I do know the machinery of the Universe. Here it is. I grasped it with my soul -- I reached it through mere dint of intuition.' Alas, poor ignorant old man! Could not any metaphysician have told him that what he called 'intuition' was but the conviction resulting from de ductions or in ductions of which the processes were so shadowy as to have escaped his consciousness, eluded his reason, or bidden defiance to his capacity of expression? How great a pity it is that some 'moral philosopher' had not enlightened him about all this! How it would have comforted him on his death-bed to know that, instead of having gone intuitively and thus unbecomingly, he had, in fact, proceeded decorously and legitimately -- that is to say Hog-ishly, or at least Ram-ishly -- into the vast halls where lay gleaming, untended, and hitherto untouched by mortal hand -- unseen by mortal eye -- the imperishable and priceless secrets of the Universe!



"Yes, Kepler was essentially a theorist; but this title, now of so much sanctity, was, in those ancient days, a designation of supreme contempt. It is only now that men begin to appreciate that divine old man -- to sympathize with the prophetical and poetical rhapsody of his ever-memorable words. For my part," continues the unknown correspondent, "I glow with a sacred fire when I even think of them, and feel that I shall never grow weary of their repetition: -- in concluding this letter, let me have the real pleasure of transcribing them once again: -- 'I care not whether my work be read now or by posterity. I can afford to wait a century for readers when God himself has waited six thousand years for an observer. I triumph. I have stolen the golden secret of the Egyptians. I will indulge my sacred fury.'"

Leibniz and Einstein: an Equation of Sorts

To wit: Leibniz' revolution was f=ma and he wrote the Theodicy. Einstein's revolution was e=mc2 and he wrote that God doesn't play dice.


Thus does genius operate as a force upon history via hypothesis of the continuing order of creation with humanity at its summit.

Life After Death: A reflection upon the issue of brain death.

Human creative thought generates an infinite array of potential for the continued development of civilization. These waves involved are quite real. Indeed, the most powerful dialogues of this type are in perpetual synchronicity with the totality of human history, past and future.

The Test for Religion

Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa in his On Learned Ignorance and Cotton Mather in his Biblia Americana each in their own way exemplify how religion can cohere and promote scientific progress. There exists a gulf between that type of Christian humanism and let us say the so called low church.

The same is true for virtually all religion. Take the Baghdad caliphate of Harun al-Rashid for instance. The development of transmission of the works of Plato, in particular his republic, as the basis of leadership by an imam parallels Cotton Mather's axiomatic approach to governance that inspired Benjamin Franklin: to do the good.

A great mission for society is necessary to uplift its vision beyond the here and now. That mission is in our stars so to speak. The ugliness of pessimism that has been virtually worshiped by so called intellectual elites in the western world for the course of the last two centuries must be overcome. There is no other path forward. People of good will are everywhere the same. That orientation is the basis for an end to the evil of geopolitics.

The future holds such a kernel for hope. Let it's universal anthem be Beethoven and Schiller's Ode to Joy.

Poe's Tomb

I walk by the tomb of Edgar Allan Poe every weekday. Sometimes I see tourists snapping photos. It is astonishing to me how large the gulf is between what the common conception of what Poe represented was. How many of these stopping by have read Eureka? And of those how many understand the underlying issue of art and science that Poe addresses therein?

Speaking of which I just finished a survey entitled Aesthetics and Astronomy. This is what I wrote there:

The reason I took this is that the APOD dated 1/22/2017 had a very profound statement that cannot be over emphasized. "No species other than human can even comprehend what is going on, nor could any human just a millennium ago." This is the touchstone for comprehending evolution. It is what Vladimir Vernadsky about a century ago named the Noosphere. It represents a true or good infinity or transfinite. Additionally the launching of humanity into space is a singularity in evolution that Bernhard Riemann modeled as a branchpoint from one qualitatively distinct manifold functional phase space through to another higher one. It also points to the absolute necessity of space colonization. It is not an option. The current crisis humanity is in the throes of can only be resolved by advancing that mission onward.

Culture Wars: Donald Trump and Sancho Panza

Have you ever, dear reader, stopped mid sentence and pondered why certain everyday terms came about? Everyday I walk my dog. It's good for me, her and the carpet. But why am I calling what we walk upon a sidewalk when in fact it's really more of a frontwalk? Which latter word my artificial "intelligence" word processor just underscored in a red wavy line. Something marvelous was afoot with our history at the time of Shakespeare. Then language was everywhere inchoate. The grammarian pedants were roundly ridiculed.

Cervantes and Shakespeare's "royal houses" were at war. But the two of them as well as their sponsors were at a different sort of war. In your mindseye let Sancho Panza stand for campesinos and bucolic churls that cling to their bible, guns and heroin today, if you will.Now imagine on stage a daily mirror of one's follies. Instead of a pimping up of one's stupidities. Recall that honest Abe was more of a Shakespearean in reality than all of the belle lettered dandified dolts soliloquizing ever and anon.

Yet are you aware dear reader that the august narrator on Don Quixote was none other than the venerable Cide Hamete Benengeli? Today this would be like yours truly advocating that the wonderful metaphor of the Necessary Existent of Ibn Sina be taught in all our schools. Radical...

Remember that Sancho was given an island to govern by his would be tormentors. And how simple Sancho outflanked them on Buridan's bridge paradox. But

The quality of mercy is not strain'd,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
'Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown;
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway;
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God's
When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,
Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That, in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy. I have spoke thus much
To mitigate the justice of thy plea;
Which if thou follow, this strict court of Venice
Must needs give sentence 'gainst the merchant there.

On the elements of life

The Renaissance Christian humanist idea of Nicholas of Cusa and his co-thinkers was that the developing microcosm of the individual human life is indissolubly and harmonically connected with the ordering of the development of the macrocosm. This principle should adumbrate the true scientific standard for the concept of evolution.


The problem is that most of our scientific research suffers from philosophical illiteracy and lacks the necessary mission oriented direction that should guide it toward maximizing its benefits for the future of society.

True Infinities versus Mathematical Models

These days the wise men of mathematics like to pride themselves on computational modeling. For example, they will attempt to evince wonderment with fractal geometry. Yet, the principle of a nested power series of true infinities much more to the point is found very precisely in Nicholas of Cusa's Vision of God. The English translation of which I have linked above. And it is a grievous error to slander Cusa as a "mystic."

For unlike the superstitious worshipers of numbers such as the egregious case of Sir Isaac Newton's numerologic magical mystical tour of the Bible, Cusa was no such fool. But then such precise and poetic irony always escapes the shallow minds of those that falsely believe if they just put a label, number, or price upon the things of their desires then they own them.

Wilhelm von Humboldt on Creativity

As I was reading a rather tiresome report this morning on the naming of colors, it put me in mind by contrast of the great philologist Wilhelm von Humboldt. This remarkable paragraph coheres with the thrust of what this blog has endeavored to represent. It speaks grandiloquently for itself:

Reality, that is, truth and nature itself, is certainly not less noble than art; it is rather the model of art. Its essence is so great and sublime that, in order for us to approach reality to any extent, the only way open to us is to forge a path as yet unknown, just as art does. The smallest object of reality is infused with the same essence; and it is absolutely wrong, that nature in its perfection could be found only in all its particular objects taken together, that the totality of the vital force could be found only in the sum of the particular moments of its being. Both may certainly appear this way, but one cannot think of space as being severed, or of time as being divided. Everything in the universe is one, and one all—otherwise there is no unity at all in the universe. The force pulsating in the plants is not simply a part of the force of nature, but all of it. Otherwise, an unbridgeable gap is opened between it and the rest of the world, and the harmony of organic forms is thereby irreparably destroyed. Every present moment contains all the past and future in itself, for there is nothing to which the fleetingness of the past can cling, as the perpetuity of living.

Further on in this same work Humboldt expresses in an understandingly diplomatic tone (for he was such) my precisely undiplomatic polemic against any false equivalence between the model of the Roman empire's evil imperialism (i.e, the "liberal democracy" of British imperialism) and the products of Plato and Aeschylus.

The test of modern nations is their feeling for antiquity, and the more they value the Greeks and Romans equally, or the Romans over the Greeks, the more those nations will fail to achieve their characteristic, specially set goal. For in as much as antiquity can be called ideal, the Romans participate therein only to the extent that it is impossible to separate them from the Greeks. 

(...) 

Life should stitch and create ideas by the fullness of its movement, by ideas superior to itself and to every activity. Man should possess a power, both by his own effort and the favor of fate, to produce spiritual phenomena which, measured by the past, are new, and measured by the future, are fertile. And, as art seeks out, or better, generates an ideal beauty in a pure and incorporeal idea, in the same way philosophy should be able to generate truth, and active life generate greatness of character. Everything should therefore constantly remain in activity—creative activity; everything should amount to the fathoming of the still unknown, and the birth of the not yet seen; everyone should believe himself now, to be standing at a point which he must leave far behind.

Steven Hawking: Anti-Science Quack

Hmm. It seems that the professor Hawking's brain has now traveled through some sort of black hole that has reversed time somehow. Very frightening. His mind has somehow melded with Parson Malthus who once wrote in 1798 that the world would starve due to overpopulation. Or perhaps he now agrees with Isaac Newton whose studies in Biblical numerology led him to predict that the apocolypse will occur in the year 2060. Or maybe Hawking has transmogrified into the persona of his cherished sovereign Prince Philip who unabashedly vows to be reincarnated as a deadly virus to wipe out humanity. http://thingumbobesquire.blogspot.com/search?q=prince+philip


If the celebrated misanthropic professor were really serious about his claim "that our species needs to work together," he would be promoting vastly increasing an international space program that could protect humanity from the real threat of asteroid impacts. He would also be calling for a vast increase in nuclear fusion research, massive infrastructure programs in cooperation with China and Russia and for an end to geopolitics of scarcity and Neo-Malthusian claptrap .