Vector Spaces

 

I haven't made a YouTube in awhile, relative to my recent frequency of production.  These are non-monetized with a low number of viewers (but climbing with time -- older YouTubes have had more time to garner viewers and so on).  My reasoning:  I'm in a "teaching tunnel" (we meet for class every week day, me the instructor), so why not aggregate developments in the background?

Among those developments would a be a next dive into Quadrays as a topic, an approach to vectors (like XYZ vectors) that's a little different and that I treat as a "language game" in the philosophical tradition i.e. as a basis for an investigation in to what we mean by such concepts as "linear independence", "dimension" and so on.  Here's an opportunity to use preexisting terms in new ways, thereby imparting new spin.

The deep dive began on an archive belonging to the Math 4 Wisdom (M4W listserv).  That 4 was especially attractive, given the 4 in 4D Solutions (my company) might overlap.  My 4D overlaps the Bucky Fuller 4D.  This isn't numerology or mysticism about words.  It's mnemonics and branding, or call it advertising.  I'm doing business when I work on Quadrays.  I consider it part of my job description.

However, the whole topic of Synergetics and the Bucky stuff is mighty alien to your run o' the mill mathematics PhD.  Wittgenstein's philosophy of mathematics got shelved awhile back, because LW seems insufficiently impressed or respectful vs-a-vs the amazing breakthroughs that've been made around infinity, thanks to Cantor and company.  He just never jumped on the right bandwagons.  Mathematics is to some extent a political process, as Bourbaki well knew.

I ended up continuing a thread, started on the M4W listserv, on Synergeo, more appropriately a home for it in retrospect.  M4W is also about establishing a new equilibrium in Europe however, which includes much of Russia (geographically and culturally speaking), giving voice to mathematicians who care to weigh in on matters bureaucratic and academic.  Citizen diplomacy is not verboten in other words, even on TikTok.

Tying Knots

In today's meditation, we're thinking about life as a process of tying and untying knots, which metaphor is deliberately left wide open to interpretation.

A standby English idiom, to help us focus, is "tying the knot" in the sense of "getting married".  A commitment is formed between two individuals (or more in some subcultures) in the presence of witnesses.  Witnesses add weight.  A community commitment, a contract known to a large public, is less likely to be taken lightly.

The absence of any ties or knots might be described as "completely unfettered" which can sound liberating for sure, but then where's the structure?  How would we get anything done, minus commitments?  We need knots to have events.

OK, now with all that philosophizing out of the way, I can turn to my special case scenario, wherein a wedding indeed occurred, and I got to be one of the witnesses, which I was happy to do.  The event was the reception the day after the wedding, at a facility rented from the working port of Bellingham, a busy place.

Bellingham is a port city in northern Washington State, not far south from the border with Victoria, a state in Canada.

I had the option to consider going by train, but given my job, with fixed hours, the connection was dicey.  And besides, I've been eager to give my car a real workout, given so many moons just sitting in the driveway or driving to Bethany Village for my teaching job (accelerated computer stuff).

Ergo, Sydney the dog and I embarked on our adventure on a Saturday morning at 4 AM.  We were back by 3 PM the next day.

Phony Intelligence (PI)

Lots going on as usual.  I was telling an old friend over lunch at Skavone's that I've somewhat psyched myself into seeing major cities and their districts (e.g. The District, with its Beltway Bandits), as the power centers.  At the level of nation-states, I'm seeing the theater, but have suspended my disbelief by and large, meaning I don't take narratives at this level too seriously in my global modeling.  

I'm talking about the scripts, the fake news.  Of course I take real suffering seriously, and as a symptom of stuff not working.  

One reason the United Nations didn't work out is it left the refugee problem for future generations.  Too many people fell through the cracks, and got no statehood.  It's still that way today.  The solution is not more walls and fences everywhere.

If you're new to this blog, you know there's some cosmology or cosmography or mythology at work behind the scenes, informing my vista.  It's relatively easy for me to self-brainwash in certain ways.  

Isn't that a truism for everybody?  What's different from one to another are these "certain ways" i.e. some trains of thought will run on tracks I never even suspected existed, or could exist.  

Some readers encounter the railroad I'm running and think the same thing:  what planet is this guy from?  Mars?

So what's in the news these days?  Well, again, lots of stuff.  

The war twixt the House of Saud and the Yemenis might be coming to a close, given tensions with Tehran are starting to slack off, with mediation from China.  All sides are realizing there's enough oil extracting, refining and shipping for everyone who wants to play, Caracas included.  

Also:  Silicon Valley Bank just went under.

From my angle, the financialists, not being engineers, have a hard time getting back to the fundamentals when explaining these developments, such as the whole driverless car scenario, a huge consumer of investment capital.  Investors were ready for their returns, and patience ran thin.  "Running on hype" is akin to "running on empty" (on fumes).

Silicon Valley banked heavily on driverless vehicle science fiction, believing tales spun by Elon Musk and so on.  

But then Musk later came around to the view that for truly driverless functioning, we'd need to solve the problem of making AI (Artificial Intelligence) into RI (Real Intelligence)  -- Pinocchio would have to become a real boy after all.  

That's equivalent to throwing in the cards, instead of continuing to bluff.  We have RI, but in the form of real humans, who still have an edge over the competition.

ChatGPT3 is a wonderful imposter, a fun house mirror, a hallmark of what's to come:  more PI (Phony Intelligence), posing as RI.  Sometimes PI is plenty, but not while driving.

Speaking of PI, the lingering excuse for a State Department is doing its best to explain to the Pentagon how everything is still under control on the international scene (the "theater").  "Everything is going according to plan" say the hapless neocons, as their NordStream fork in the road proves to be a dead end. 

I'd say the neocons have lost the battle for hearts and minds, but they'd given up on winning that one long ago.  They've been losers for decades, even while at the helm of their mock government, their fake USA.

Speaking of PI (phony intelligence), Pi Day is almost here.  Pi is "phony" in ways we should talk about.  There's some fun philosophy in this neighborhood.

Lab Leak

Let's help the journalists remember SARS1 (just called SARS) and other virus outbreaks we still strongly doubt came directly from a lab.  Some people think HIV was lab brewed.  Most don't think we had the science, let alone the motivation, to infect the world with AIDS for no good reason (Georgia Tablets?).

So then SARS2 comes along, and kills a lot of us, including lots of people in China.  Tucker Carlson is quick to tie the gain of function lab leak thesis to some nefarious plotting on the part of the Communists.  John Birchy stuff.  

Maybe true.  Every party has its share of severely retarded (mentally challenged) people.  "The Chinese wanted to hurt the western economy" -- what a dumb way to go about doing it, if so, and what a dumb goal in the first place, as it's all one planetary economy (ecosystem).  Most Chinese know that, no?

Much more likely, if we go with a lab leak narrative, is that it was accidental.  This wasn't anthrax mailed from a DC based biolab.  This wasn't some nerve agent from the USSR, used to go after Britons.  This was the kind of thing that happens in Andromeda Strain (science fiction by Michael Crichton, 1969) when someone gets sloppy, or some piece of equipment fails.  

Hollywood could make this movie easily.  A room depressurizes.  Sirens go off.  Lights flash.  Someone gets sick.  Then more people get sick...

So then do we say "the Chinese" accidentally released the "China virus"?  We could.  Many do.  

We could also say "the virologists" released an "artificial virus" (not occurring in nature) by mistake.  Virologists have shown themselves to be reckless in other instances.  That these virologists happened to be Chinese in China doesn't matter, or doesn't have to.  The funding was international, we already know that, as is the subculture of virology.

What looks so suspicious from Tucker's point of view is that a certain database went off line, after certain lab faculty disappeared from pubic view.  

Did the take down of the database seriously impede the world's response?  Was this all part of the plot?

Given an accidental spill would likely result in a coverup, to forestall possible retaliation or other unpredictable actions, removing all traces of the experiment might have been step one in the wake of the spread.  That's not a science minded response, but we do not live in a science minded world.  Pointing the finger at innocent animals, such as pangolins,  is always easier than owning up to a major error.

However, virologists have gotten good at sequencing.  Lots of labs were working with coronaviruses (one of the most common kind) including, we think, in Ukraine, with its share of big pharma biolabs and nearby human guinea pigs.  

Sequencing an isolated virus specimen is not hard.  The mRNA technology was ready to roll.  The virus RNA was easily reverse engineered.  Piece of cake.

So we might speculate that virologists added a little hook to a SARS coronavirus to make a version 2.0, which they then accidentally lost control of, in a lab in China.  

That makes Chinese the victims, who by and large did their best to contain the spread, and by extension the rest of the world.  

The new virus could have just as easily started in Ukraine, or in DC.  

So say it started in China.  Does that make it all a Communist plot?  Maybe it does, if you're Tucker minded.