Tom Veatch

Still it is pretty fun and cool, considering this was the intellectual pinnacle of humanity for 2000 years, and plus I'd say this is not a bad introduction to "term logic", and might be suggested reading for students of computer science, philosophy, classics, and/or math.

Tautologus Rex!

Comparing this Y2K perspective, so crystalline, with the remarkable 2016 Trump disruption, makes for a curious read. Premonitions here include (1) that it DID require a wealthy candidate to spurn corporate funding and change things around, (2) that a new 3rd party that I then called 'Spin' DID emerge, and (3) that the forces behind the 2 party system DID arise to crush things back into duopoly again.

(Unforeseen comes realignment of the right from Buckley or Reagan conservatism to reality-show populism, powered by internet rage-o-holism, structured by information-siloing and personality-siloing, bound into a cognitive space of parallel, alternative-facts universes of convenience, and poisoned by a rhetoric of trollery.)

Hilbert's axiomatization of geometry, full of redundancy, led me to a generalization which makes geometric dimensionality a characteristic that can be counted up (as in point to line to plane to space, etc.) and down (space to plane to line to point: etc.) Geometries, by intersecting, create lower-dimension geometries; for example two intersecting 2D planes create a 1D line. Geometries, by projecting, create higher-dimension geometries; for example, two 0D points project a 1D line.

But if there is no upper limit, perhaps there is also no lower limit. The idea that a geometry might have negative dimensionality seems absurd, considered within the assumptions of spatial thinking, yet it derives from the same less-redundant axiom set as the geometries we understand. Suggestions for intuition and use of this idea are also given.

Not laser-like focus on self as in the later Veatch, but as in actual lasers doing self-focusing, in which the concentrated laser energy is so great that the material it focusses onto heats itself up and the heat changes its optical properties so light beams don't just cross through at that point but they bend back again and again after the focal point. It doesn't just focus to its focus but keeps on staying focussed at a tiny focal point or line, sometimes producing a tiny explosion as a line or as spots or pops or explosions all in a line inside the material. Nice. Both actually and metaphorically. In which I pressed the Fire button many many times, watching for a bright light, and recording the outcome. In which, further, we discovered that lasers don't actually explode things as much as we hoped.

This was Star Wars fundamental research, which if successful would enable lasers to shoot down satellites, or equivalently, to blind them. The fact that we were working on it, I mean our side of the Cold War, that mere fact alone, was itself enough of a threat to the Soviet Union (the results could have been positive; imagine the military consequences to the USSR!) that they were forced to seriously compete in military R&D and expenditure at the cost of their social, educational, and cultural budgets -- the driving reason they lost the Cold War.

So don't say negative outcomes in research are worthless.

Price discovery; Market Equilibrium a false idea; Money being the metric of Value, what is the value of money?; Financial forces: Hydraulic Flow versus Smarts; Can we even bet?; The Turkey, The Butcher, and the Antifragile Investor; The Making of Money; Tech Deflation; Two Arms of Value; Real Value; Epilogue.

If you are in a relationship, learn this. That means you.

Everyone likes oxytocin. But it can mess you up, so know what you're dealing with and be responsible.

An essay toward a parametric model of species success and failure. A clear thought experiment showing how it proceeds, what factors influence it, and how to aim for a soft landing as resource limitations start to squeeze. Relevant to us? I think so.

Also this adds Fuzzy Logic to neural networks, including how to train them. Finally this goes into Space Representing Neural Networks so robots can represent space, or humans' representation of space can be understood better. Three months of work is in here.

Tea Lady is a web app for testing if an assertion holds up statistically. Great, easy, accessible, quick, observational experiments by anybody, anywhere.

Tea Lady applies Fisher's Exact Test repeatedly as you do live data collection.

A predicate, for some category X, and some property Y, is the statement that X's are Y. That could include anything. The truth of it, though, can be empirically tested with the Tea Lady on-line tool. You watch and classify: Observe the X's and Not-X's that occur or come by, and record whether they are Y's or not Y's. Tea Lady keeps count and gives you a P-value or significance measure.

A Myers-Briggs/Jung influenced view of character and temperament and its lessons for us about people we could hate, people we do love, and our own selves. With a critique of the Big 5 temperament model.

Please read the part about how to select a romantic partner.

Water waves come in a small set of types, listed here. Discover the anti-causal wave, the Soliton, the horizontal sheet flow, and other curiosities. Then, try to explain them.