Newcomers to these blogs need those DVD series catch up segments, like in
Lost, as if it mattered in
Lost. These blogs have long-running themes, and one of them is "what is work?" with "work / study" a connected meme.
In
a physics sense, breathing and oxygenation of the blood is a huge workflow involving miles of tubing, and pipelines off photosynthesis whereby sunlight, atmospheric components, and dirt (
with living minerals) are transformed into fruits and vegetables, and not only in Central America.
A human being outputs somewhere between 200-300 watts in some models. Watts are already a per time unit, and brightness is a measurable aspect of burning energy more quickly, a higher wattage. In economics we say "productivity" but then we also say "pace yourself". We're
getting into athletics.
An athlete "works out" and "trains" to perform in specific ways, in a kind of theater or play that's more kinematic than about spoken lines, though off the field we do interview players, as a part of the sportscasting genre. Spoken line theater requires acoustics. We have that inside the helmets sometimes, but not for broadcast in that case, as we don't want the opposing teams to lurk in on each other.
Human metabolism is only practical within a "phase space" of related parameters. Your exact place in that phase space is fixed by "arguments" corresponding to those parameters, the latter (the params) being the algebraic "placeholders" like x, y in some linear or many-powered equation.
When you figure out the (x, y) pairs that solve the equation, you get a line or other manifold of points and may refer to individual points by their (x, y) address, by their args. How much you care about "continuity" depends on the namespace. Permeability may be assumed in cell biology.
For example, if you eat a huge amount and only exercise a little, your body has a clever way of banking the excess and saving it for a rainy day, when you'll have a way to "burn it off" maybe by shivering. You've gravitated to a specific space in the phase space, a set of neighboring points wherein a human metabolism remains a continuing possibility.
However if that rainy day doesn't come soon, your slowing down may spiral and you'll wind up in bed having a hard time overcoming your own inertia. A kind of
Gibbs Phase Rule is involved. How much pressure are you under? What's the temperature? When you can't get out of bed, your muscles start to weaken. Astronauts know about working out in zero gravity, but for humans on Earth, countering gravity is their chief workout, even when swimming.
People get driven to work in order to pay off incurred debt in many cases. Every bill to pay becomes a debt, so lets summarize everything in nature, in chemistry, as a kind of bookkeeping in which energy laws must be followed, and not because humans say so, but because physicists don't find exceptions, or if they do they get new kinds of phenomena, like "dark energy" to compute with.
My schedule drives me to walk a few miles most mornings. If you 3D print the Asylum District from say Sunnyside-Richmond out to the Mt. Tabor neighborhood, you'll notice a continual rise in altitude going east, in the direction of the Mississippi, parallel to the Columbia Gorge, perpendicular to the Pacific coastline. I'll do work (
in the physics sense) climbing to the
top of Mt. Tabor and then descending. I've made this trip over and over.
Without diving in to any "black budget" or "dark web" for my example data, I'm able to come around full circle and identify Labor with some kind of bookkeeping, relating to biophysical "expense accounts" such as flowers and bees incur, simply as a consequence of needing to stay powered. They've got that wattage to work through, at a specific rate. DWA / 4D Solutions got started in bookkeeping, as a fund accounting and computer programming partnership.
"All You Can Eat" restaurants sound like a losing proposition until you factor in the obvious: a single human has a finite capacity, even if "pigging out" (as we learn from our farm days to name certain eating habits). Biology kicks in. You're not given take-home boxes, as you are where you buy by the portion. The food is yours to eat now, not later, and that puts an upper lid on it.
In
General Systems Theory, our Sims games (
remember Sims?) may revolve around
a refugee camp. Able minded able bodies show up, with a mix of disabilities, everyone perfectly who they are, and self organize.
On TV they may say the children in refugee camps are getting no education but that's impossible as humans self program more intelligently than any
Deep Learning neural net the AI people have managed to come up with. AI people tinker in their garages, looking for magic algorithms, but humans are born with working equipment.
Confusing learning with school is a confusion on the part of the TV people, not the work / study students in the camps.
In GST one looks to the cafeteria line in an All You Can Eat setup wherein most refugees aren't into pigging out. But they haven't room to cook or stash much food in their living quarters in some models.
They have a study carrel there, a PWS, with a Rasberry Pi... did you notice the science fiction elements here? That's called "modeling" or "as if" (like on a Google Sheet). We swap in different
models of Cubby (importing from the CSN namespace). In an earlier chapter, we were all about the XO, another educational device.
What I'll be doing on Monday is sharing about an API, what Harry Potter or his school mates wave their magic URL over to make the stone release its sword. That's right, I'll be telling tall tales, sharing lore, around a somewhat technical subject, dry as bones if not jazzed up a bit. I'll be presenting about
that tiny Flask application I've been working on, the one with the Glossary, Periodic Table (unfinished) and Shapes tables behind a veil.
Farmers expecting to haul vegetables to the cafeteria from photosynthesis sites (solar powered), need the calories to do the hauling, plus the lifestyle, if done for long hauls, requires pacing. The farmers may use a variety of comm devices and Linux-powered calendars to inform their HDTVs. One windmill + storage battery may suffice for the electronics, with a backup generator. The farmers intermix with the refugees, in terms of roles. We may or may not need to model language differences.
In Martian Math, we may tell a science fiction story in which the ETs have safe refuge, on one side of the gorge, Earthlings on the other. Or call it a compound, or campus. The farms are nearby. Assume the ETs and Earthlings overlap in the same metabolic phase space and are able to file through the same cafateria line and "pig out" together. That's to serve plot line development.
We're building a fictive phase space in which to engage in STEAM learning, with A for Anthropology, a part of PATH (see
The Math Myth by Hacker). In building a dam together, the Martians and Earthlings need to compare and reconcile different models of 3rd powering, the whole XYZ vs. IVM thing.
My morning
walk up Mt. Tabor is a habit of longstanding, however given the new bike from a sponsor, I'm trending towards other loops that exercise different muscles and elicit other kinds of real time judgement. Portlanders (PDXers) love to bicycle so I'm no sore thumb in blending in with the other cyclists, even with all this grey hair (or "white" as some call it).
