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WuffenCuckoo

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Everything posted by WuffenCuckoo

  1. "Happiness is a day off. Ecstasy is a day off with pay."
  2. Now do you understand what I was getting at?
  3. Benjamin Franklin wrote: The most exquisite folly is made of wisdom spun too fine.
  4. I experienced a 4.4.earthquake once. I grew up in a city that is subject to mild (minor 1 - 1.5 on the Richter scale) 'quakes (called microseisms - due to tunnels collapsing in the many mines in the region) a couple of times a week so I was astonished to note that the terror evoked by the very noticeable (and relatively prolonged) shaking of the earth was all out of proportion to the stimulus. I don't really want to be in a 'big one'. The psychological effect, like the physical effect, is wildly non-linear.
  5. I am astonished. I suspect that members of hypography all consider themselves somewhat superior to the thundering herd yet all you say you listen to is contemporary pop music (with the one exception - the Moonshine sonata) that probably will be totally forgotten within fifty years or so (i.e. as soon as the baby boomers are all extinct). This is about the same order of magnitude as everybody admitting that all they ever read is low grade comic books. Shame. Shame.
  6. Whenwithal == the time to do something you really want to do.
  7. The purpose of science, as I understand it, is to discover the underlying laws governing the 'real world'. (I take it for granted that such laws exist and can be discovered). We do that by creating (inventing) a model and using the model to make predictions about the real world. We test the models by doing experiments (with the model telling us what to keep constant and what to vary). When many predictions are borne out (repeatably, by many experimenters), we declare that the model seems to be 'isomorphic' (in some way) to the real world. This declaration elevates the model to a 'theory'. Through invincible ignorance I will conflate the terms 'model' and 'theory' and use them interchangeably. There is usually a spectrum of models because science has evolved. If your model of the world is that it is carried on the back of an elephant that is standing on a turtle (and its turtles all the way down), and you are satisfied with a poetic view of the universe, that is fine. But if you want to calculate eclipses, then it is not good enough and you need to advance to something like the Polemaic system with its crystalline spheres and epicycles. (I will ignore cartesian vortices). If you want to send a rocket to Saturn, then you need the Copernican model and newtonian mechanics. If you then want to calculate how neutron stars waltz around each other, you must have einsteinian mechanics. Each model must be driven to the point where it breaks down, when it must be either extended or replaced with a new paradigm. Where you stop depends on what you want (or need) to understand. It is strictly pragmatic. Belief has nothing to do with it. Independent, repeatable, verification of the predictions provides the 'truth'. If your world view is that the earth is 4000 years old and that darwinism is wrong, you are welcome to your view. But, don't pretend that you can study any real biologically-based science or be a paleontologist with that limited view. If you do try to do that, you are a charlatan because more cogent models exist and have been tested many times and in a multiplicity of ways against 'reality' and are consistent across many (if not all) other scientific disciplines. Of course they may have some apparent inconsistences - but resolving them is part of the game of science.
  8. Credo: "What you think about -- when you are free to think about anything you want to (other than sex) -- determines who and what you are." I wandered, fortuitously, into Science Forums. I liked what I saw, so I promptly joined. First thing I need to know is how to modify my screen name: What I really wanted to use was 'WoofenCuckoo' (== 'barking mad' - courtesy of Berkly Breathed's 'Opus' comic strip), with a bar over the first 'u' and umlauts on all the last two 'u's'. Is this possible? (Wouldn't that be a great name for a garage band?) I am retired. I have a machine shop in my basement and I am a member of the New England model Engineering Society. I am a volunteer (Thursdays) at the Charles River Museum of Industry in Waltham MA. I was a systems programmer (writing mostly real-time operating systems) for over 40 years. When I was first exposed to computers, very close to fifty years ago, I realized that what they were being used for (and are still mostly being used for) -- tools for doing arithmetic and keeping track of business data -- was essentially trivial. What I thought was important was that they opened an unprecedented dimension (orthogonal to the physical world) in human thought and I resolved to try to determine the emergent laws governing information processing. To my astonishment, I seem to be alone (still) in this endeavour. The great practical use of computers is to simulate complex systems. Their protean quality and ability to perform teraflops is important too (as Karl Marx remarked, 'Magnitude has a quality all of its own'), but in a different way. I claim to have discerned some of the underlying emergent laws of information processing. Applied to the brain, say, these laws explain the function of sleep and the synergistic interaction between the sleeping and the waking brain. What I have totally failed at is to convince the editors of peer-reviewed journals that this is not frivolous. As soon as they see the term 'information processing' they go into catatonic shock. Not being affiliated with any research organization does not help either. I now know why Max Plank said, a century ago, that 'Science marches on, one funeral at a time.' I am quite aware that these assertions make me sound like a crank. I assure you that I am not a crank, but you will be able to judge for yourself as I participate into the ongoing debates.
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