Slipping Redux

Changing schenarios or re-ordering deterministic next states I call slipping. Here is my slipping history
1. Stealing the 603 and making it the first useful PPC embedded CPU
2. First arrest
3. Second arrest
4. Third arrest
5. Roadside rescue by law
6. Fourth arrest

I was intensely aware of the boundary between the expected and the unexpected. I put all my energy into self-deception upfront and then all I had left into running the simulation. Paco got it mostly correct. I did it without any help though.

Seven. Plus or minus two

I put 7 gallons of gas into my car yesterday because my paycheck had not hit my account. I planned on putting $20 in the tank and then I thought that was too little or too ghetto so I thought about $23 (first prime > $20).

I awoke from my slumber to the result of a simulation running on my Bayesian machinery. Papa Legba told me:
Choose X such that; 5 units < X < 9units.
Since this was Austin and not Avignon the unit of measure was gallons. This is almost exactly 1/2 a tank. Hummm...

The total was $23. That is the first prime number greater than 20.

In Avignon I drove all day, everyday and filled up the tank with pretend gallons for pretend money while the pump showed strange euro/liter messages that I ignored. There are four liters in a gallon and that was true then as it is now. I can do the math - I choose not to mind the result.

In Avignon, a native would be able to drive around town on errands after putting 7-8 liters into the tank. That is about 2 gallons and a driving range of 120 Km (80 miles). That took me past two markets in two neighboring villages on a Saturday afternoon. I could have picked up anything for our small apartment with that small payout for gasoline.

Synchonisity.

Possible Worlds Epistomology

 I was talking to J. Tuesday night at our men's meeting when the subject of husband and wife argumentation came up. When J. described how his arguments unfolded, I heard the frustration of someone inculcated with the a priori correctness of his position. Taking this certainty for granted, he could not consider his wife's position as a valid response to stimuli. It's not that she was just wrong and he was right for the best possible reason - the fact was that he could not allow the possiblity that he could back off of his position and land on another completely valid but slightly different good outcome.

I mentioned that one solution could come from a 'possible worlds' approach. I said that both J. and his wife, when finding themselves divided on the form of the solution, could briefly sketch in words or on paper what the end state - the solution writ large - in a defensible possible world would look like. The two versions could then be dispassionately examined and rationally differentiated.

Then we came to the barrier to J.'s imagination. "But what if I am right? I KNOW I am right!". He could not imagine the case that he could be 'less wrong' or even 'slightly less rational' or even 'possessed of an improvable correctness'. No, in his mind this was a clear choice between a good possible outcome and a bad possible outcome. My comrade D. chimed in with some pertinent information about Venus and Mars. "She will usually be guided by nurturing impulses and the male considers status and power." Again, no discernable difference in J.'s answer.

Then I said that I was using a 'possible worlds' construction to imagine multiple good choices and not just the 'he said; she said" trap of my good idea versus your wrong-headed idea. I felt like I had the wisdom of Moses.

Then I read this fine entry on J. Fallows blog about the international society theory. Traditional nations and states imagine that their individual Leviathan looks inward to compose a social contract. But neighbors, friends and associate states comprise a society that is without Leviathan. Relations between nations in the neo-Hobbsian view are nasty, brutish and short.

Strictly by Bayesian reasoning  (or reading the WSJ and Barron's) a global Leviathan has an astronomical probability of being true now and even more rational in the course of civilized time. This is "The End of History" that Fukayama described.

Fallows (actually his stand-in Sam R.) makes the case that China and America are no more outside of an international communality of civilizations than Texas and New York are outside of a communality of states.

The Meta-Leviathan is completely possible in principal. A coalition of kingdoms of the earth is a possible world in my reading of Leviathan. A Meta-Leviathan obtains.

His holiness Karl Popper addresses this issue in The Open Society and its Enemies by constructing the dynamics of the closed society in the grip of historicism pushing against the rational open society. What holds back the historicist is an undying love for ancient ideologies long past their usefulness.

The degenerate form of reactive conservatism in the GOP lives in Platonic rapture -- looking to some past utopia imagined as an earlier North American society inflated by the ghosts of Plato philosopher kings. In this imagining, the tablets of Mt. Sinai were carefully re-written by the holy spirit working through the minds and hearts of the founders. This received wisdom - directly from the stormy heavens instead of from the enlightened and empirical minds of English gentlemen - cannot be known except to the elect. Political Christians along with the Hebraic minds of  AIPAC are up to the task of interpretation of these scriptures.

Letter to Fallows re: Loongoon MIPS

I predict that the PRC's MIPS based Loongson and Godson chip-sets contains a feature where in a special factory test mode the contents of completely obscure and un-architected registers are over-written by encrypted firmware (e.g. in on-chip flash) that becomes the hardware root of a vast secure and encrypted back door architecture that neuters whatever exists of Anonymous or WikiLeaks in ten years. That is why I would invest in a native, dialectic materialist Instruction Set Architecture with The Party's back door in the foundation at bedrock. Only they could be capable of bringing down Skynet. Or become Wintermute. The choice would be theirs to make.

I just made this myth up as an exercise but I have done much the same thing as a chip designer.

sbop
Kirk "most registers are not specified by the architecture" Holden

 

Just hold down the reset pin long enough and watch the processor spill it's bits into a tester. While the test registers empty one bit at a time from the tail, I could feed any order of bits into the head. I could blow things up, repair things and just make donuts in the parking lot for the thrill of it. Chip designers only divulge these secrets

The really interesting fact for me as China announces the long term strategy to develop a completely proprietary hardware and software solution from super scalar (von Neumann CPU + scalar GPU) down to "world phones" that run the smallest telecom call manager with a single instruction set architecture (ISA). The project for innoculation from WinTel and ARM solutions will, IMHO provide a Chinese umbrella that anyone and everyone could in principal join.

The important thing is that both the hardware and software base is open source. It may be that this is a special PRC brand of open source where the encryption and security back doors exist from top to bottom. Applications down to device drivers will be, to pick one obvious example of STUXNET, free from foreign breaches and open to the PRC sniffers. Note also that Chinese Black Ice (cit. Wm Gibson) can't actually crack open the originating Chinese Dialectic Materialistic ISA. These tools in the hand of the most powerful nation by the time the products rolls out can out at or near the scale of current world wide installed base of Linux server farms and Android smart phones and tablets.

A historical footnote here - Motorola developed a still born "low energy architecture" named M*Core which was such a failure in the market that the architecture was offered for $0 fee. The only taker was a research institute in China. The computer scientist have been busy for a long time on this project. The project will make an impact whether it spurs competition in the West (very, very likely) or subverts the established hegemony of Intel and ARM in pervasive, embedded hardware.

Also notice that many, many features of ISA's establishes interfaces between co-processors like GPU. These types of interfaces have only just been invented by AMD and Intel where the GPU comes onboard and is stitched into the low level hardware fabric. Then it all gets presented in minute detail at ISSCC (for the circuits) and The Journal of Computer Science (or whatever passes for that conference in San Jose that everyone publishes in now).

The west is doing the R&D heavy lifting and then publishing for the sole purpose of bragging rights to innovative breakthoughs.

This is exactly how the PC killed DEC in the 1980's. It may be time for another revolution.

Did I do it on Purpose

The hindsight bias finds a greater probability for events after the fact than is reasonably probable from any evidence prior to the event. The availability bias causes me to attribute the causes for events to things I already believe to be true.

So I ask myself - did I mean to go insane and emerge as a practicing Buddhist? Or, more rationally, did I just make a series of choices which soon became fewer until almost everything was a forced move. More plausibly did I deliberately set in motion a series of events which would eventually force me to act out the Drama on Rundberg.

Will Sergi and Larry Ever Die?

"The future is already here, it is just not very evenly distributed." - Wm Gibson

If ever I doubted that Sergi and Larry Google were closer to the Rough Beast of the Technium, I would doubt the Technium. But now, absent accidental death or deadly tumors, I believe but cannot prove that the corporeal selves of these two will not pass from this earth.

First and foremost the Google incorporates as not other presence has before the complete neural connection of every zip code and area code on the globe. There is nothing I can know that is not already available on line via Google. That is Sergi and Larry's brain child and it contains lots of their persons and prosperity.

Simulation

According to the Simulation Argument we are living in the Matrix. According to Nick Bostrom, this is how it works to a natural conclusion.

We shall develop this idea into a rigorous argument. Let us introduce the following notation:

: Fraction of all human-level technological civilizations that survive to reach a posthuman stage

: Average number of ancestor-simulations run by a posthuman civilization

: Average number of individuals that have lived in a civilization before it reaches a posthuman stage

 Myth #1 - The Matrix
The Architect saw a slim margin by which he - a heterophenological agent comprising agents within agents - could save us. The huma attempts to boil away the sky with global warming succeeds beyond our dreams. Only burrowing insects and burrowing humans survive. I wager that 6 million humans live in Zion while a billion live in the hive mind of the matrix.

The primary purpose of the Matrix is to simulate biology so that low level interaction with the environment is maintained. Our simulations become the low level drivers at the base of the technium. We live while the Rough Beast lets us live. This beast will go the stars without us.

Myth #2 Man and Rough Beast are Yin and Yang
This scenario differs only slightly. I live in growing human hive which may reach 8.5 Billion by 2050. On or about this date the Singularity emerges to guide the technium without human volition or choice. The interface between biota and Rough Beast is the mortal humans with mortal souls tending to the Zoo. The Zoo is whatever remains of the DNA life enhances with synthetic live to balance ecosystems. I patrol the border between ancestral live and synthetic life and keep each in balance.

A thing that I believe but cannot prove - Myth #1 and Myth #2 are oscillating phases. The technium gets us over the disaster we insist on pulling down around us and brings the biota back. The increase in extropy - entropy far from thermodynamic equilibrium - determines the state of play. And since time is tenseless

Myth #3 Waking Life
A man was born, he lived, he died. Ad Infinitum. Do not adjust your set. This is not the Twilight Zone.

Looking the Rough Beast Eye to Eye

My probable futures hold a large cohort of my time zero wholly or completely within the Technium. I am Rough Beast in many possible near universes. I am a rational choser; the Regulator. The illusion of choice is a myth I will tell now.

A Myth I just made up.
When Zarathustra descends from the mountain, he is full of compassion for us all but he must yield to the voice of the crowd. This crowd that might want a rope around his neck.

Authority pushes against compassion. A slave owning man points to vague, long rebuked notions on many subjects. A subject upon which he was spectacularly delusional was the supposed support his ignorant persuasions about the authority granted him to trade animals that looked an awful bit like regular people. These supposed animals read and even wrote books that came from intelligent white forgers most likely

Locus of Imagination

The imagination laser myth begins with a definition of myth. I don't know what you think so I must tell you what I think and then depend on you to follow the shit I am saying. Word salad at this point for one reason. There is a boundary between sanity and not-sanity marked by a line of demarkation. One of these bad habits, regulating a police sergent to the point of insanity.

With mouth function I produced the output of disassociated minds. The left hemisphere and the right hemisphere are trying to agree on a plan for what happens next. At each fork in the logistics map; that specious moment that 'time is out of joint' a coalition of fermions and bosons transmits information to electrons, neutrons and protons that a message must me sent to biochemicals and the stones of the earth, who upon hearing this voice cell walls that enclose a locus of effect. This multidimential point in m-space must choose a next location by imagination from neighboring nations, states, counties, parishes, neighborhoods, clans, me.

The locus of imagination, an intuition pump or lasers target spot must choose between two futures both equally valid and existing in neighboring universes in the multiverse which is self simlar at all levels of abstraction. If I name it I claim it.

The narative that accompnies choice happens well after the slowest impulses have gone into another state. Each future state depends on the past state. Each past state depends on it's neighbors; each future state depends on it's neighbors.

The nearest neighbor for a locus of imagination manipulates homeostasis into the direction of decreasing entropy and increasing extropy. We are salmon forever swimming upstream. But our intuition at best gives us guesses and hunches sometimes based mainly on myth. When I jump off the high cliff into the water for the first time how do I land? The second time the question is how do I keep my balls from being crushed? Then how do I dive from this height. The answer is provided by someone who did not ask for advise the first time and knew that only on the second attempt to tell me just jump for the other bank when you dive, you will still over rotate. It meant something the second time and nothing at all the first time and my coach knew this.

PRC Leadership

CPC - Communist Party of China

President Hu Jintao  -  CPC General Secretary, 
Prime Minister, Wen Jiabao, Premier of the State Council

There are 22 provinces with Taiwan considered the 23rd.

Economic growth in 2010 was >10% and PRC GDP passed Japan to become the second largest economy behind the USA. China will be the world's largest economy by 2015.

Design is

A definition of design from "Test Generation for VLSI Chips" [ieee press], :

"Design links the abstract specifications to the physical device through a synthesis or assembly of known parts and generates data necessary to drive the equipment that physically produces the assembly."

The first step in becoming a designer is learning how to use an assembly of known parts. The background necessary comes from the BSEE degree. The assignment of known forms, also a design function, comes next. I started with input-output drivers like everyone else. Then I learned how to design an inverter, a dissipative structure far from thermodynamic equilibrium.

We built each inverter from the transistors; none started life as a blank slate but almost. The level of design abstraction for circuit designers was the single MOSFET transistor.

on insanity

without 5mg of Zyprexa, an anti psychotic, I no longer exist. The the the suchness.

I'm Not Anxious, I'm Insane

Cognitive behavioral therapy is good and gets good results. Good follows good but it only goes so far. In the limit, rational choosers will eventually tire of the confusion and admit that going farther crosses a line of demarcation.

The demarcation problem Karl Popper drew separated the real from the not real. Things not real could never penetrate the veil. But what about my brain states while reading "The Mists of Avalon". Neural correlates of conciousness about The Lady of the Lake.

In my constant life, regulating temperature I bound mortal phenotype, a line of demarkation
I bound extended phenotype without loss of generality.

By meets and bounds I claim the holon, the string, Papa Legba, The Navigator, The Warrior, The Scribe, Big Man, Big Mama.

By Twain I leave color, or remove it from my site. I remove the color from your world as I break you down. I add my color as I build you up. This is a fabulous rebuilding I do for you. Old aches and pains are traced to their root. Your anxiety increases as you realize.

How very, very little you know about this subject. Any subject. The suchness. I regulate.

St. Augustine I

St. Augustine by Gary Wills, Penguin Lives series.

The Hook

The hook I crafted required an answer by the logic of courtesy. I knew close up the kind of accident that gets forgotten. The relentless push for productivity drives us without mercy. That is what the Gini Coefficient struggles mightily to convey. The usual charge; that math and logic together with compassion and experience produces a false artifact. That is to narrow and I wish to broaden it.

I went crazy to gather some information about what the bottom looks like from the bottom. What I found was boundless compassion for my fellows. Because they were pressed to the grindstone by relentless, suffering, burdensome and irksome toil at a rate of two and three jobs at a time. Nobody should be without a job in this country. But what about a country that took another route. The French are well educated to a baby in his crib. They work hard. They live in a land that came from much hard work and it suits them.

The citizens of PRC are rational materialists. Not all of them of course but enough to make the engine run hotter and faster than our machine. Our vast machine currently surpasses theirs but this will not last and I know it from close examination.

When I look at my feet I see another countries shoes and I count on knowing something about that country in my nostrils, my bare feet and my gut. Not allowing for this produces in me a poverty of experience.

Happiness - Know Limits

The Meets and Bounds of the happy life.
Moderation, the hallmark of the happy life, follows the dictates of reason. Aristotle's maxim that virtue leads to the happy life demands moderation and restraint along with caring and sharing.

The hanged man expresses the relation, in one of its aspects, between the Divine and the Universe. Nirvana; the mind like fire unbound.

His expression demonstrates the release of the self to a higher power. Of the three types of happiness, ecstasy must come by moderation in all things to prepare a path to altered states of consciousness.

The Happiness Myth - Jennifer Michael Hecht

Happiness - Know Thyself

Quite introspection, active study, focused effort.

Happiness - Carp Diem

Reach for this day, tomorrow is out of reach. Take what is yours, play the part, become the role and the role will take you.

My guidepost here is
BB - 10th, 11th and 12 steps
The Four Noble Truths - the metaphysical dimension of right action
The Eightfold Path - wisdom, ethics and study
Peanuts - Chas. Schultz speaks through Linus's compassion

Pack more into the stream of life. Experience is everything.

Happiness - Know Death

One must face death often for happiness in this life. Whether seen as an end or a change, I prepare for this certainty often. Our communality depends on more than superficial understanding of our ends.

Historically all people watched their loved ones die in bed -this is how death happened. Death was not a cause for celebration per se but the communality of relations and friends gathered together to memorialize the death of a kin offered a venue for catching up with relatives regarding their accomplishments and defeats.

My great grand John Holden died in the predictable circumstances - at home in bed. My maternal grandmother died in her bed at home of colon cancer under the care of a hospice nurse and her daughter Laura, an RN. My father died at home in his sleep with my brother there to watch over him.

I never held a death vigil - I should have helped my father pass but I did not. I missed my greatest experience and I have this regret still.

PRC v USA Gini

According to 'The Spirit Level' and my reading of Marx, when the proles know that they are proles they are much more likely to keep the 80/20 rule and the Gini Coefficient well below the current US 85/20 anxiety factory. I believe but cannot prove that when 80% of the people share 15% of the wealth the proles brew tea.

Having said that, I was told that the acres of shiny new condos in Xing Dao that I saw in 2006 were being built by tens of thousands of men with shovels for the hundreds of goverment officials from Bejing. But having said 'having said that' I take it all back if I need to and make this point.

Is it James F. or Thomas Barnett in the Bear Suit?

Violating Hume's problem of induction, invoking Popper's falsification of conjecture and invoking Trey and Matt gets me to this.
-------------------------------------

After reading 'When China Rules the World' I ponder the next forty years as a continuation of past trends. On that, it seems that by the end of the present decade the PRC will match the US GDP but spread it out over three times the headcount. By 2050 (induction alert) the US GDP will lag by 1/2 the PRC GDP from various estimates on the internet which I carefully chose to align with my confirmation bias.

But I just read some great long form journalism about coal and it prompts this conjecture. The US is a thermodynamic system that produces more entropy per person and more entropy overall today by rolling fleets of Prius coal burning passenger cars. Okay, to be fair 30-40% of them are fueled by natural gas but they do not run on clean electricity. What will bring the PRC to parity is my reluctance to do the math along with their rational materialist approach. They aced the Thermodynamics final and might keep the lid on riotous exuberance at the big bonfire. Not overall but according to headcount. But again they are not getting stronger while we weaken - they are getting stronger faster than we are getting stronger. It's the entropy.

In other words no country spends more and gets less than the one I drive around in with my big body V-8 Ford.

Thermodynamics: it's not just a good idea; it's the law. And notice how I didn't talk about 380 ppm of Coca Cola fizz. When I talk to my brother-in-law the Petroleum Engineer we stick to thermodynamics to calm the tension over initial conditions in nonlinear systems far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Like going from 350 to 380 ppm over the Christmas Holidays.

Not Ready for Heterophenomenology Players - Consciousness

Right Consciousness dissolves self to star stuff. Her memetic holiness, Susan Blackmore has provisional freewill and so do I.

The seat of the self, these virtual heterophenomilogical engines support the SELF. Impernament and emerging from the ego; my existensial identity and constant or free life [cit. thermoregulation of constant life]. I will postpone exaggeration.

Thereafter comes the archetype of 'the SELF. It marks the last station on the way to individuation, which Jung calls self-realization' For Jung, 'the self...embraces ego-consciousness, shadow, anima, and collective unconscious in indeterminable extension. As a totality, the self is a coincidentia oppositorum; it is therefore bright and dark and yet neither'. Alternatively, he stated that 'the self is the total, timeless man...who stands for the mutual integration of conscious and unconscious. [cit. Wiki Self in Jungian Psyc.]

This is for the people in the cheap seats. Star stuff from the deck of the Enterprise.

He looks marvelous.

Not Ready for Heterophenomenology Players - Concentration

Right Concentration reveals the holistic mind. His holiness Dr. Dennett explains the cog wheels of cognition.

Not Ready for Heterophenomenology Players - Effort

Right Effort minimizes entropy while maximizing exotropy. His holiness Dr. Ludwig Boltzmann and his twin Dr. Ilya Prigogine are the twins.

Not Ready for Heterophenomenology Players - Livelihood

Right livelihood prepares my hearth and home for my communal life. His holiness Mahatma Gandhi is the avatar of livelihood. He spun at home while GB fumed and left the Raj.

Not Ready for Heterophenomenology Players - Speech

Right Speech changes my circumstances by tossing out the idle words, the angry words, the egotistical words and the obsessive thoughts turned to words.

Papa Legba stands at a spiritual crossroads and gives (or denies) permission to speak with the spirits and avatars. Legba is the great elocution, the voice of God, as it were. Legba facilitates communication, speech and understanding.

His holiness Papa Legba is the navigator.

For Jung, Papa Legba is the Animus. He takes on the role of guide, or mediator, to the world within and to the Self...a mediator between the ego and the Self.

Not Ready for Heterophenomenology Players - Action

Right Action is incremental; the last state must lead to the right next step to stay on the eightfold path.

Not Ready for Heterophenomenology Players - Intent

Right intent prepares me with best guesses about what happens next. I program response.

Jennifer Michael Hecht is earth mother. The bringer of happiness.

I intend to float like a butterfly. Not so much stinging like bees though. My goal, the happy life unfolds in three parts:
1. happy day
2. ecstasy
3. happy life

Jung sometimes referred to such archetypal figures as "Mana" personalities, supraordinate personalities, and treated them as equivalents to the Self: 'the mother ("Primordial Mother" and "Earth Mother") as a supraordinate personality...the supraordinate personality as the "self"'^.

At other times, he saw them as representatives of the collective unconscious - as bridging-posts to the totality.

Not Ready for Heterophenomenology Players - View

Right View - Virtuous Compassion

The Avatars:
Right View -->Tenzin Gyatso, his Holiness the Dali Lama
Right Intent --> Her holiness, Dr. Jennifer Michael Hecht
Right Action --> his holiness Dr. Benoit Mandelbrot
Right Speech --> his Holiness Papa Legba
Right Livelihood --> his Holiness Mahatma Gandhi
Right Effort --> his Holinesses Dr.s Ludwig Boltzmann and Ilya Prigogine
Right Concentration --> his Holiness Dr. Daniel Dennett
Right Consciousness --> her Holiness Susan Blackmore

Each locus of phenotypic effect virtualizes a vast cohort of subjective machines. Virtualization is the creation of a virtual (rather than actual) version of something in the area of computing, such as an operating system, a server, a storage device or network resources. [citation: his holiness Jimmy Wales]

The information bandwidth, the information transmitted, the information processed and the resulting behavior or choices made from the experienced describe the massive computation produced by human minds continuously.

The Buddha suggests that by sharpening my mental axe I may constrict my choice of behaviors to the right ones. Every specious moment the thousands of robots comprising my soul run Bayesian algorithms that weigh countless inputs against memories of past experience and expected future outcomes.

From Jung, After the confrontation with the soul-image the appearance of the archetype of the OLD WISE MAN, the personification of the spiritual principle, can be distinguished as the next milestone of inner development.

Jung sometimes referred to such archetypal figures as "Mana" personalities, supraordinate personalities, and treated them as equivalents to the Self: 'the mother ("Primordial Mother" and "Earth Mother") as a supraordinate personality...the supraordinate personality as the "self"'^.

At other times, he saw them as representatives of the collective unconscious - as bridging-posts to the totality. Jennifer Michael Hecht is earth mother. The bringer of happiness.

Evolution of Confidence

Response to a very fine post that was referenced in The Daily Dish

The nuance of evolutionary psychology is that my brain did not evolve "for" anything but past fitness test by way of my parents (and grandparents) genome's constant struggle for life. Beginning 70000 years ago the human fitness landscape was shaped in every generation on a population of phenotypes that were selected for
Symbolic ties between our verbal clues (proto-words) and the physical objects (nouns) and actions occurring between those physical object (verbs). The selection pressure was not 'for' anything. Certainly not investment banking and piloting jet aircraft.

But I designed computers for years that were not 'for' anything. Except running the code of the last generation of computers. Which were designed to optimize, in an environment of struggle for survival against Intel, National Semiconductor, Zylog and the like.

In 1980-1984 when I worked on the design of the 68881 Floating Point Co-processor for the 68020 we did not optimize either microprocessor 'for' the Macintosh because, even though the 128K Mac ran on the predecessor 68000, because we did not have access to Mac GUI since we started the designs before 1984. So how did we design something 'for' the lady with the hammer? The same way that my ancestors designed for yesterdays challenges by pressing mental machinery designed by evolution but not 'for' anything that was going to happen next.
Following the floating point code step by step, which is all I got paid for, resulted in Mandelbrot zooms and weather forecasting and (strange loop alert) engineering workstations used to build more advanced computers. Which were designed for last years problems.

So evolution design with past information and we frail humans imagine that we also must be designed 'for' something. And we are - we are designed to make our grandparents happy and successful. This is my rebuttal to the argument from teleology that often creeps into our intuition about evolution.

Cosmic Cedar Chopper

I speak at the level of the Walmart. We speak with dead metaphor. We s

I am

we form i am.

Letter to a Materialist Sam Harris

First - Your talk at the Texas Book Festival was wonderful and many atheist brains were there with neural correlates of right morality. Except for the nihilist. I saw the security detail and realized how much stress you are under for announcing an obvious truth about faith. Keep it up.

There is nothing you have written or said that I disagree with so this is nuance that I want to share for what it's worth. As a materialist I am drawn to eliminativism because - thanks to your books - I do not believe that "faith" or "belief" explain much of anything. Simply put - all these faithists live in a state of perpetual and unending anxiety which lays the groundwork for atrocious action. When I hear "God has a plan for your life and THAT'S why you're completely fucked!" it *still* makes me anxious and I am on decent meds now.

Consider two subjects:
Akbar - sees his female property in the cloth bag and prays for the death of all apostates five times daily, has just been fitted with a vest full of C4 and ball bearings.

Bubba - lives in a gated community in Birmingham Alabama to keep gang-bangers from raping his women, has just added a fully automatic pistol to his gun collection.

My conjecture is that in both cases the "faith" and "belief" of these two are non-existent. The actual brain state of anxiety caused by continued reminders that people are dreaming of messing with their shit is the problem. These daily exposures to the frightening material world create the seeds from which suicide vests and guns to kill black people sprout.

Right up until last Thursday Benoit Mandelbrot was calm fractal. Dr. Weinberg thinks about particle physics day and night for 50 years and gets smarter *not* anxious (although I did get him started on meatpuppets on board the ISS on Saturday before I saw you). Dr. Dawkins thinks about extended phenotypes day and night for 40 years and gets smarter *not* anxious. Anxiety is not a meme it is a meme substrate (memestrate) upon which mischief flourishes. What I believe but cannot prove is that the brain states like the ones you had on the powerpoint are the substrate upon which all memes grow. People can be sad, mad, glad, transcendent, bemused directly from the same brain state because their particular meme-sauce rides on top of the energy produced by particular brain states. This crackpot idea comes from two sources:

1. "The End of Certainty" by our late UT peer Dr. Prigogine
2. Certain wild explanations for my lack of female companionship

This is all hush-hush because I don't want to go back to in-patient treatment again.

Which brings me to my last point. Where is your "Selfish Gene"? I have a place for it on my bookshelf for anything you write but I need a popularized science book on the brain to put next to "In Search of Memory". If I have to wait until after you're Nobel that will be okay.

Stand by our President,
Kirk Holden

My Sum of Histories

When I was three years old I walked across the parking lot at El Matamoros holding Daddy's hand. We were headed to a dark 1953 model Chevy sedan. I don't remember getting into that car or any other car. I don't remember what I ate or even if I had anything to eat. Momma may have been holding my hand in the parking lot. The resturant may have been El Toro and not El Matamoros. This moment of three seconds duration in my three year old working memory was reinforced on the night that this happened in about 1959 or 60 by a dream that same night.

By the time I woke up the next morning several neurons grew dendrites that reinforced various synapses to fix this span of time that probably lasted as long, in real time, as two bars of music. I can think of no reason that I would remember this. It is likely that this is now my earliest memory that made its way to long term memory.

Tobin, my brother, came home on February 11th or 12th from the hospital with Momma. Daddy borrowed a sweet red and black Plymouth from Max who worked with Daddy at Hoffman Paints on Burnet road. I was 30 months old. I may have been at El Matamoros walking across the parking lot around this same time. These are confusing first long term memories not yet bracketed by slightly earlier and slightly later memories from which I build the narrative for what later became my self or my ego or my autobiography.

Lou Ann, my older sister, climbed to the top of a bookshelf that Momma and Daddy put on the porch to strip

Keeping Up

Of the two choices; keeping up and ~(keeping up, we find keeping up an evolutionary stable strategy. On the first day that the first proto-chimpanzee gather the visionary proto-chimps and set out for the savannah - the lower quartile on the visionary scale did what they always did - they got left behind because the could not keep up.

I Algorithm

Momma's fingers in my mouth. Getting the dirt out. Watching her hands as the made dinner. Waving her hands while she tells a story with a new voice for each character. Falling in love with a girl and putting our tongues in each others mouth. I put my finger in her and she puts her fingers on me. Watching her write notes in the library.

Corpus Callosum Tuning

The Corpus Callosum is the largest white matter structure in the brain, consisting of 200–250 million contra lateral axonal projections. It connects the left and right cerebral hemispheres and facilitates inter-hemispheric communication.

I run experiments daily exercising the workings of the CC.

1. Two presentations feeding the visual cortex. I am not aware of the probable relationship of the frontal lobe to "bring together" the left-eye/right-lobe and right-eye/left-lobe visual information integration.

While driving, I stare at a spot (bug splatter) on the windshield and 'see past' the short focal length. Two spherical projections like two snow globes - the left eye and the right eye integration of visual information not yet joined together.

2. Stare at the 'vanishing perspective' of I-20 on the horizon either on a straight line or a gentle curve. With music playing, I relax and blink in sync with the musical rhythms. The effect of looking into the arm of a fractal starfish is impressive. I smoke K2 blunts and eat chocolate with almonds. I take sips of Diet Coke on ice from a 32oz foam cup. The interplay of the senses brings the fractal starfish to amazing emergence of integrated information. This I believe but cannot prove is the 'empire of the senses' [citation] from Claude Levi Strauss.

3. Walk on a nature trail and stare into the structure of plants. Look at nature through the lens of the blackberry phone.

4.

Yeshua ben Yosef - the wrong IP addr.

[I made this up from scratch, just like John the beloved disciple who never met Yeshua.]

Yeshua ben Yosef was a religious fanatic known as ‘Yeshua the Failed Carpenter’. Losing three fingers to sharp hand tools convinced him to follow in the footsteps of his cousin, ‘John the River Dwelling Fanatic’. He preached a message of love and earthly destruction. If you think he was your Jesus you have the wrong IP address in your route table. Yeshua was stoned to death at age 31 for apostasy. 13 other apostates had been stoned to death that year, 17 would be stoned to death the next, 11 had been stoned to death the previous year. To keep the whores, prophets and publicans under control they kept plenty of stones at hand.

The tired message, "I am the messiah, the world ends now!" was tired. You just could not shut these fuckers up without a hail of stones, a wooden club or the jaw bone of an ass. Once they bled-out in the middle of the street, they calmed down a bit. To be replaced by the next batter on deck. It was a messiah factory. Hanging or crucifying would have turned anonymous fanatics into famous fanatics. Quelling insurrection FAIL.

The 13 heads hanging from the gates of Jerusalem had lost their impact but they made the authorities feel authoritative. The bones of the fanatics, gnawed on by the dogs that were kept for such purposes, made excellent furniture and decorative accessories for the hut or hovel.

For several hundred years many street corner sermons and at least three subsequent scrolls plagiarized this popular fable for its popular although incomprehensible plot and wildly mixed metaphors. Poor people who got poorer, rich people who got richer, poor people that were healed, rich people that got demons. It was like X-Men crossed with the Justice League - there was no telling how this shit turned out. Was Magneto a hero or a villain? Was Yeshua THAT Yeshua? No, the other Yeshua, the one that hung out with Yehuda - no not THAT Yahuda, the other Yahuda. The Yehuda they called Rocky. No, not the Rocky named Simon, the Rocky that herded goats or fished – I cannot remember exactly. There only like 7 names available so it gets confusing.

The Syrian Greeks were in the midst of a Jewish Intifada when the temple fell in 70AD [sic]. The Romans felt that a militarized client state could provide them with a strategic foothold in the Levant. To keep things unbalanced the Romans arbitrarily switched regimes every once in a while. The Syrian Greek Intifada had ended several years before. The next Syrian Greek Intifada was scheduled 7 years hence. This was an infinite loop. It continues today. Remember the stones? They still had plenty of them in piles to throw at each other.

An excerpt from the Haaretz of the time, Josephus, gives a play by play of the action. This was like Basic Cable – Josephus was a Red State talking head. He worked for a policy group and appeared before the Roman Senate to debate the Blue State talking head from SHITAC, the Syrian Hellenistic Israel Tribunal Affairs Committee (whose works were burned by the Council of Who Gives a Fuck in 475 AD):

http://www.bibleweb.com/content/josephus1templefall.htm

What Josephus describes is a perpetual civil war across the Levant. That is not news. Look at this YouTube video:

http://il.youtube.com/watch?v=jlr3eqlxSGs&feature=related

If you prefer the view from the other side it is available in your favorite confirmation bias.

37 year after Yeshua died (no, not THAT Yeshua...), the Romans instituted a Two State solution by demolishing the Temple in 70AD [sic] and encouraging the Jews to get the fuck out of the Levant. Several generations of Hellenistic Jewish scholars debated the words of many philosopher/fanatics of Yeshua's generation and several earlier generations. Fanatics from generations before these fanatics were “prophets” both major and minor.

One fanatic, Mark, wrote an allegorical description of a soon to be long dead Jewish nation that rejected any doctrinal criticism and especially apostasy, the gravest sin against Yahweh (father of a thousand fanatics). The message of this fable - this is a massive cluster-fuck of a region to be born in – was lost on subsequent generations. This tale of woe was written years or months before the fall of the Temple in 70AD. The fact that it seemed prophetic should be tempered by a quick read of “Fooled by Randomness”. Put 500 chimps in a room and one of them will spell more words right than the other 499. Burn the other 499 scrolls with fire. Successful algorithm for selecting prophets is successful.

To recap, generation after generation of zealot marched around the streets and alleys of Jerusalem begging to be stoned and eaten by feral dogs. If you can’t generate four ripping yarns from this rich tapestry of fanaticism - you are just not doing it right. Remember, L. Ron only had imaginary spaceships and dormant volcanoes and look how that turned out.

"Believe in me! I come to kill your grandchildren." says a man blocking your way in the alley behind the church. IMHO we can all feel the hand of the almighty at work here.

I will be making up other accounts shortly. I think I will write four garbled fables. That should cover all the bases. Don't count on them to be coherent. I will be starving (not for 40 days that would be life threatening) when I write the first. I will be on shrooms when I write the second. I will be stoned when I write the third. I will go off my anti-depressants for the fourth. To save time the first three stories will be cut and paste versions with snippets of ‘The Zombie Survival Guide’ and ‘Fodor’s Tajikistan’

Using a random sentence quotation generator on my texts, I will prove that fish live in trees.

That's just my opinion, I could be wrong.

Next Week: Cthulhu was a Thetan

The Will to Flower

Spinoza's god, the universe, contains all things.
The thinking things (res cognitans) and the unthinking. But our attraction to will, especially unfettered, unconstrained, untamed or unhingeded will appears perverse.

As I dig each Sunday to uncover the diamond the size of refrigerator buried in my back yard, I ponder my will - the motivator for or cause of my shoveling. God's dirt is on God's yard. God's dirt is in God's hole. The answer not only blows in the wind, it exists along with the wind. Wind, the movement of some but not all gas molecules in our sea of molecules, curls like the gnarly pipeline above.

The Flower Sermon captures the motivation for the kind of will we can use. The student yearning for the glimpse of non-self "in charge" of decisions "from our selves" or the color of the flower petal.

I cannot regret my past. I am the product of my past and exist because of a sum of possible histories that delivered me here.

I cannot rewind the tape - no spoon exists. I cannot bend the spoon - no tape exists.
a aaabcd deeeee eee iiin nn nnnnn ooooo o oopprs ssss stt ttttw xx

The Rough Beast: Respect Her Authoritaah

I was musing this weekend about the May 6, 2010 "flash crash" that drove the Dow down 1000 pts. in 10 minutes. What I believe but cannot prove - that the Rough Beast has flexed her slow thighs - has some confirming evidence here:

http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2010/08/market-data-firm-spots-the-tracks-of-bizarre-robot-traders/60829/

Briefly, a small market analysis firm, Nanex, monitors bot trades that are short, sharp and meaningless. These trades are "nonsensical" with respect to buying and selling securites - they exist purely to plot frequency response of the global financial systems. As I commented on that link:

"These are testing the Z, the impedance of various networks. Once the frequency response is known, that information is itself a market commodity. Next algorithms that send signals over THAT channel to measure Z will start. It's turtles all the way up."

As Dan Dennett says - this is a substrate free Rough Beast. The conceit that we are waiting for a Singularity as a distinct machine with specific computational qualities ignores the obvious - the protists that eventually accommodated mitochondria did not have to wait to develop mitochondria own their own. Natural selection is not the college board.

I note with interest the R-christianist adulation of all forms of Authoritaah. Now "free enterprize" joins the canon of more god, more guns and lynched gays. This accommodation of the very engine of middle class financial ruin by the wage slave middle class confirms Marx better than all the failed projects of Lenin, Stalin and Castro.

The christianist ideal is substrate neutral. God IS the market. With CDO's and CDS's he is well pleased. Robot trades, his modern angels, make the straight the crooked paths.

The Book I Read is in Your Eyes

Regarding Spacial Disorientation (SD)

The Peripersonal [3.1416] is for reaching & direct manipulation of objects, your strike zone.

Focal Extrapersonal is for visual search & object recognition.

Action extrapersonal is for navigation & orientation within topographically defined space.

Ambient extrapersonal is for postural control and orientation in earth-fixed space.

I cannot see my face reflected in my eyeball in a mirror. My face would be inside my pupil but the pupil is a hole in the iris that does not reflect. If the book I read is in your eyes it does not have my face in the book.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Buddhabrot_logistic_map_animation.gif

I can see that the lobes of the cartoid are a saddle and that the big circle is one in front of another. The brain actually contains the Mandelbrot set as the mind. The mind is the Mandelbrot surface in the brain.

Look at the top of the Blog - the spiral arms of the fractal are represented by the green ribs on the left. The car is at X(0) at T(0) with the vanishing perspective (VP) inside the Starfish arm. Lights in the dark are Starry Night































The horizon converges on the vanishing perspective. Imagine moving down the road at 70 mph such that the time to reach the horizon shrinks to a vanishingly small time. The encryption and compression on the holograms.




















[3.1416] Flight Motion Effects on Human Performance, F.H. Previc from International encyclopedia of ergonomics and human factors, edited by Waldemar Karwowski c 2006.

I like Coffee, I'm drinking some now. PS [3.14]
For a long time 0-45 I did not consider myself a coffee drinker. In fact I was a dedicated coffee avoider. I even had a story about my coffee avoidance.

As Little Bobby I believed that rejection of coffee implied my rejection of Little Bobby-hood. I was wrong about the particulars. I did not like coffee because everyone drank bad coffee back then. Robusto beans taste like shit. I didn't need a jolt because I got plenty of sleep. There was absolutely no reason for coffee to touch my young lips.

Daddy liked coffee even on hot summer days. When Nana Fay came up from SA the two of them would exchange family updates over coffee. They got caught up from the last time they talked. They paid special attention to the unexpected or unpredictable. Anything other than "she's just like that" or "he said before that he was going to do that next time". Sharing family behavior is a good trick. You find out who has a hand out or who can give you a leg up - depending on your situation.

The self-deception I invented was that I didn't want to be just like Daddy. Otherwise I would have liked coffee. Daft of course but that's what I came up with. Worse still, later when I mistakenly rejected Daddy's skewed perspective on life I lumped the coffee avoidance into a transference narrative. Also completely wrong.

In college I started drinking Diet DP and later Diet Coke. I enjoyed both. I didn't miss coffee because I was still around bad coffee at work and no coffee at home. When I was a young 40, Beverly Vann and I were at work after 10pm and she invited me for coffee. I held up my Diet Coke "don't do coffee". She told me that I was missing something. The warm coffee delivered a jolt that the cold DC did not. I didn't try it then (??? dumb, stubborn ???).

In San Francisco, Olga and I both tried Irish Coffee at the Buena Vista and I was hooked. When we were leaving for the airport Olga got me a latte at SB and we added some Jamesons. Heavenly. I could be Little Bobby again. Which was always self-deception.

SBOP

Altruism and Culture - 90,000 BCE

Where's the damn ketchup?

from the Economist:

Dr Thomas and his colleagues also rely on a mathematical model. They are trying to explain the pattern of apparent false-starts to modern human culture. The species is now believed to have emerged 150,000-200,000 years ago in Africa and to have begun spreading to the rest of the world about 60,000 years ago. But signs of modern culture, such as shell beads for necklaces, the use of pigments and delicate, sophisticated tools like bone harpoons, do not appear until 90,000 years ago. They then disappear, before popping up again (and also sometimes disappearing), until they really get going around 35,000 years ago in Europe.

The team drew on an earlier insight that it requires a certain number of people to maintain skills and knowledge in a population. Below this level, random effects can be important. The probability of useful inventions being made is low and if only a few have the skills to fabricate the new inventions, they may die without having passed on their knowledge.

According to Dr Thomas, therefore, culture was not invented once, when people had become clever enough, and then gradually built up into the edifice it is today. Rather, it came and went as the population waxed and waned. Since the invention of agriculture, of course, the population has done nothing but wax. The consequences are all around you.

A catalyst for self-organization.

I believe that individuals can form teams around big problem solutions using only the shared imagination within the team. External forces or the sum of all energy outside the team may initially overwhelm the individual trajectories or the individual potential for delivering solutions dispersed around the problem that do not converge to diminish the problem to a manageable size. Problems of manageable size from problems of unbounded complexity and intractable difficulty explicitly describes what an existentialist labels 'being from nothingness' . Structure emerges from simply integrating over a region of maximum disorder.

From thermodynamics, a system in maximum disorder or maximum entropy has no free energy. The momentum of all particles dissipates through collisions and the difference in potential energy vanishes as the entire system reaches a uniform temperature with all particles at rest. But notice that such a closed system was never of much interest anyway except on a final exam in thermodynamics. Our senses remind us everyday that open systems interacting with other open systems present compelling opportunities for each individual.

Calories in the package of potato chips are potential energy for snack time. Carbohydrates, oil and salt in stomach acid feed our cells. The entire ensemble of digestive processes solve a problem together; converting products of biology into energy. This ensemble of animal digestive solutions self-organized over time through heritable, encoded symbol strings message passing though the gene pool. This process seems removed from the dry physics of thermodynamics when you dismiss solutions from science which provide simple evidence that humans developed thermodynamics to solve all the problems that directed effort in other fields missed. Thermodynamics sweeps all the little pieces together that were left out of the critical calculations.

At the end of the calculation, a thermodynamic summary clears away the debris left from every missed estimate of expected behavior. Models predict behavior. Behavior represents the sum of all actions and reactions. Actions and reactions, reduced to specific direct or inferred measurements of position, momentum, energy, mass and all other physical properties can be managed as populations with statistical or probabilistic behaviors. A center of gravity will move or stay put from the motion of a rotating object even though every particle of the object is in motion. The model of physical structures which includes the notion of a center of gravity or an ideal point in a four valued Cartesian description transforms a football's trajectory in the air into a parabola's with minor fluctuations. The parabola is not a physical object but simply a trajectory from a kicker, a ball and gravity. The development and delivery of the football from culture and the development and delivery of the kicker from biology came together to solve a specific problem. The problem; testing one football team against another team of sufficiently equal capability to produce an entertaining experience from an exchange of energy producing good feelings in the players and the spectators.

The good feelings at the football field emerged from the exchange of energy. The physical phenominon of feeling is called a neural correlate of consciousness. According to Francis Crick, part of self-organized team that solved for a useful model of DNA, spent his time after this accomplishment producing a model for vision and eventually consciousness. Cricks recommendation for a model includes a specific measure of specific types of energy states in the brain. One ensemble of electrical, chemical and biological features corresponds to "seeing the color red", a universal ability of nominal human consciousness.

A feeling of anxiety whether weak or strong has a distinct numeric value across a large population of humans which is very tightly grouped over time and across most individuals tested. The diffusion of the neural correlates of anxiety into regions or sub-populations which marked differences from the norm does not happen.

The stimulus for a particular anxiety state happens first. A car ahead of me on the freeway suddenly hits the brakes and decelerates rapidly. A call to my broker brings me bad news. The smell of smoke wakes me up. Each of these events depending on my previous learning and experience will put all conscious humans neural correlate of anxiety. The duration will vary as the quickest thinkers invoke sufficient cognition with sufficiently short delay.

An experienced driver will brake to stay between the car ahead and the car behind. A novice may break too fast miss the bumper in front only to cause a collision in the rear. An experienced mechanic will keep the brake system in top shape. A drunk will miss everything but somehow escape all damage. Each individual experiences an identical brain state as the initial condition. The routine behavior that results depends on history and learning.

An athlete has muscle memory. The practice field is not for conditioning of the muscles alone but for the habituation of specific and carefully controlled ensemble of behaviors. A design review is not called to teach basic skills in design to the novice. Specific behaviors or specific patterns of behavior are studied for variation of outputs. Skipping a complex step has an immediate upside in time saved. Skipping a step that has never been skipped before in a series of steps is risky and demands experimentation or modeling.

The model most likely exists in various ways in the minds of the design community. Although a conventional self delusion drives the collection of vast quantities of trivial nonsense, leaving data uncollected when the norm is obsessive collection of data demands experimentation. Many routine behaviors may be run poorly or in haste such that at least one historical and habitual behavior is omitted. In a later step of the process the missing data may destroy careful predictions of future behavior. However, most data exists in a particular way that almost certainly guarantees nominal results no matter what.

Measurements on a population shows a mean and variance about the mean or the measurement results becomes useless trivia. Searching for a symbol or a data value with prior knowledge of data rate, phase relation of a symbol to a period, the units of amplitude and other characteristics of the symbol representation generates results of a certain type. For a large population and with sufficient quality of measurement method, results integrated over time form certain distributions. The variation in rate of production or absorption and the variation in the variation in the rate over time suggest standard models for understanding past trajectories taken, trajectories possible and ranges of trajectories predicted in the future from knowledge of current or initial conditions.

Non-equilibrium thermodynamics takes the black box of classic or equilibrium thermodynamics and adds a simple model change. Although many state transitions are vastly more likely than all others, most state transitions are not instantaneous. I cannot stand in Times Square at midnight on New Years Eve and catch a flight to Austin before the stroke of midnight. Although this transition in state if physically possible for an Air Force pilot with a fighter jet warmed up on the flight deck of a waiting carrier, my access to Southwest Airlines or Continental on-line booking does not get me a solution to this change of state.

The rate of change in the rate of change is greater for the pilot with his jet than for me and my checked luggage. This fluctuation in travel time could result from another change in state from war to peace which removes the preferred mode of travel from the Airman but consistently gets me to Austin with plenty of peanut fuel for energy. This local difference has modes or regions of energy exchange that are randomly turned on and off. Everyone with plans to fly this year in North America cannot show up on the Wednesday before the third Thursday in November at an airline ticket counter and fly the same day or the same week. Time, specifically the irreversible nature of time which 'causes' an ordering of passengers in space and time divides the problem of airplane travel into manageable chunks or regions of distinct energy exchange with resulting fluctuations in response.

An airplane in a thunderstorm burns more fuel than an airplane in clear weather. Some flights are canceled and each leg of a flight has a variation from re-routing and load balancing. We accommodate these variations based upon our experience and learning from history.

The first time I experienced a delay in arrival I worried that I would miss my connection. The reason that this is an exception is that the entire system understands the routine sources for individual delay and models butts in seats to minimize effects across a population. In proportion, a medium growing to large segment of the traveling public feels a delay in the system response. Local weather effects are contained by the elasticity of neighboring regions. Planes are re-routed to alternative airports and the spare bandwidth of the system dynamically adjusts.

This process for moving passengers is not static. Of all human culture, airline culture evolved rapidly across a significant portion of the earth's traveling humans. I book online and travel without tickets since the airlines and the travel services keep my information networked. I work from a shared plan that keeps my intentions stored under change control. I need to get to San Jose on Tuesday and get back to Austin through Phoenix to touch base with the part of my development team. Thanks to self-organizing structures like the airline industry, I can plan and execute my travel with minimum work.

The individual behaviors and the individual capabilities supporting airline travel did not come from charitable support. Airline pilots do not depend on Church basement soup kitchens to fly planes for the glory of god in this god less nation. Airline pilots form unions that negotiate large scale economic results for airline pilots. Pilots never complain as every public school teachers often do that the pure love of flying compensates for the privation from poor pilot salaries. Pilots are not more important than garbage collectors or high school English teachers; they just negotiate more effectively. Self organizing behavior for premium wages works well for a population of nearly uniform historical learning from the military. My tax dollars train military pilots who go on to fly for Southwest Airlines. I did not need to draw this system on my whiteboard. Herb Kehleher at Southwest Airlines did not need to invent the entire system. I plug in to a self-organized module called air travel.

The equation for this system exists only for non-equilibrium thermodynamic models. The variations and fluctuations support the emergence of structure from less structure or no structure at all. Being from nothingness happens constantly in non-equilibrium thermodynamics.

We can't keep doing what we've been doing: giving designers fast, automated tools that blast out poor designs because we trust them not to blast away like robots, then excusing them like robots when they blast away.

Maximum Pandemonium: Rovian Bootstrapping

Connectivity, like gravity, has an inverse square power over distance. A signal is structured information. Self-organizing structures, communicating over connected means, will therefore bootstrap a coalition around the loudest voice in the room. Pandemonium, the amount of connected structures bootstrapping a coalition, provides a consistent and repeatable measure of structural quality. In the limit, maximum pandemonium results from certain connected, self-organizing structures.

I claim here that a useful reduction to practice for maximum pandemonium, such as a manufacturing process for digital electronic circuits, provides tangible value as a means for self testing during construction and assembly into larger, increasingly connected structures.

Specifically, subsequent to each photo-lithography step in the fabrication of integrated circuits or networks of transistors, sufficient self-organization results for self-testing through maximum pandemonium evident in any collection of connected parts.

The Toll House Cookie recipe works with or without prayer.

I have run the experiment with a control group to test this hypothesis.
One group of cooks professed a personal relationship with Jesus. One group preferred Crisco shortening. Each group was divided into an A-team and a B-team with at least one member of each group as a control group. The control group smoked crack while the other four groups baked cookies. The control group was originally told to watch TV in the living room but decided that smoking crack would introduce a random variable and I could not argue with this line of thought.

Believers/Prayers, Believers/Non-Prayers, Pagan Cooks/Prayers and Pagan Cooks/Non-prayers had similar results except for the high levels of THC in the cookies of the last group. The control group burned themselves and the cookies.

The next step is to add an element of trained skill to each group given that the simple task of baking cookies seems within the reach of most primates. We will move to skeet shooting or low-power microprocessor development depending on the weather on the day we are all free to run the next trial. My research suggests that prayer or at least messages to heaven are very difficult to remove from skeet shooting. Even pagans mutter 'goddammit' after getting a bad shot off and missing a clay pigeon. According to my consultants at the seminary, this must count as a curse which is a legitimate form of prayer to some laymen. I have learned not to queer the results of any scientific data collected in the field and so I must footnote this and move on.

The most surprising results come from the Jesus on a tortilla experiments. We have a small collection of tortillas with either Che Guevara or Jesus Christ clearly charred into the surface of a flour tortilla from the Pagan/non-praying tortilla warmers. Each group produced at least 100 carefully warmed tortillas in a 30 minute trial. The believer/praying team was disqualified for scoring the skillet with a scribe tool to enhance the image but since these tortillas bore an image of Milton Berle and not a recognizable deity, this was judged as statistically insignificant and did not affect our conclusions; you can see almost anything on a charred tortilla that you want to find there.

ZeroTheist - ex nehilo deo ex machina. If I could actually translate latin that would make a cool tattoo. Or I could put this into some tribal pattern and just tell everyone that it MEANT "by reduction, I remove god from the machine".
0theist or 0<><. But the fish thing gets so old. Like starting a baseball team to protest baseball. Playing on the other team's home field never seems like a winning plan especially if you don't have more than two or three players anyway.

Newsweek does the usual treatment. In a otherwise sound survey, SJGould gets a big splashy pen and ink drawing next to MMO'Crazy. Both dead and both so very wrong in most respects.

The bottom line for 0theists and CEOs of Fortune 500 companies - there are never very many of either group. CEO's have so much competition and even then the ranks are thinned when you eliminate the Fooled by Randomness cohort.

Many folks behave as if there were no faith. When they open their mouths to speak, the results vary. But many people have given up on the instruction manuals and try to put things together by intuition. Let's face it, Target and Walmart sell lots of press board furniture to illiterate or innumerate or dis-graphic individuals that erect home entertainment centers by trial and error. Even when you follow every step you are left with a handful of crazy looking screws, nuts, pins, biscuits, cams, springs and even Allen wrench/torx tools that never get used. If it holds your DVD's, CD's and TV without falling over - you are a master craftsman for a day.

The educated and sophisticated tolerate party manners and cocktail party chit-chat on faith.

You do not get anywhere with a naturalistic framework showing unless you are in the hard sciences. Business texts hide the 0theist conclusion altogether. It is not necessary for the recipe to work. Steps 1-7 or Method I-IV of the new '10 second manager' do not touch on the god in the machine or the lack thereof. The Toll House Cookie recipe works with or without prayer.