Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, pursuant to our distinguished lecture, documentary & interview symposia, on Friday night this week because I feel like it, here for your delectation is Steven Henry Strogatz, the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Applied Mathematics at Cornell University, presenting his talk on How Things in Nature Tend to Sync Up (23:13). Steven is known for his contributions to the study of synchronization in dynamical systems, and for his work in mathematical biology, engineering, and complex network theory, including his Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos textbook.
In tonight’s show, Steven asks, demonstrates, and answers the question: “Does existence need life to achieve synchronization?”. And of course the answer is no, yet the mechanism you may find to be more fascinating than you would have thought it to be had you not watched this SDA LNR DLDIS show, not having realized that when the metronomes are placed on the coupled rollers, they then have and do utilize that mechanism for the exchange of information. Without life. Like stars and leptons. Which reminds me of the first two shows in this series (what, you didn’t expect me to link it back up?).
One of my favourite quotes from Steven in this video starts at 5:49:
Keep in mind that although it looks as if each individual is acting to cooperate, what’s really going on is a kind of selfish Darwinian behaviour; each is scattering away at random, to try to save its [self]. That is, out of the desire to save itself, each creature is following these [four simple] rules, and that leads to something that’s safe for all of them.
Even though it looks like they’re thinking as a group: they’re not.
That’s so cool. Has it ever occurred to you that it may be the case that the only thing that fundamentally exists, metaphysically, is information, and that things like matter, energy, and force are just taxonomical categorizations that we apply to manifestations of certain classes of metaphysical information, in order that we may use them as epistemological tools? It may be all well and good that a planet has to orbit a star according to Kepler’s laws, but how does that planet know that star is there? The answer, of course, may be that gravity is nothing more than a kind of information.
Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.
Pamela Geller of the blog AtlasShrugs.com is very impressed by PM Harper’s speech unequivocally condemning anti-Semitism and the Mumbai massacre. Previously she also mentioned Canada as the only nation on the U.N.’s Human Rights Committee who voted a against a anti-Israel condemnation (the U.S. is not a member.
Canada’s PM Harper: Defender of Jews, Israel:
“Wow. Look what Canada has. They have a hero at their mantle of power, we have a craven subversive. ugh.@
Fire. Them. A.., er… wrong thread.
…-
“N.B. unions warn of 700 public sector job cuts
FREDERICTON — Public sector unions say the government is slashing 700 jobs in Tuesday’s provincial budget and they warn services and the economy will suffer as a result.
Representatives of the six unions huddled today in Fredericton to discuss budget details they were given this week during a meeting with the premier and ministers of finance and human resources.
Tom Mann, executive director of the New Brunswick Union of Public and Private Employees, says 300 vacant or soon-to-retire positions won’t be filled, while 400 people will be laid-off, and none will be offered early retirement packages.
Human Resources Minister Rick Brewer earlier confirmed a two-year wage freeze, but said existing contracts will be honoured.” (ctv)
no, tenebris, you are holding on to an outdated definition of ‘information’ as particular differentiation. I absolutely disagree with such nominalism.
Either a pattern exists in spatial and temporal measurements – or it does not exist. If it doesn’t, then, heh..it doesn’t (exist). Oh, and before you move, again, into nominalism, there are four different spatial measurements and three temporal measurements.
As for generation gap, I’m not talking about linearity of relations but behavioural relations. Try again.
Yes, indeed, vitruvius, Shannon it is. That’s because communication theory is totally different from information dynamics – and tenebris is talking about communication. Not information.
“Robert Fulford: Obama’s curious intelligence appointee suffered death by blogging
Until quite recently only a few Americans, those with a special interest in Middle East politics, were aware of the existence of Charles W. (“Chas”) Freeman Jr., the former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia. But this week he popped up on the front pages of major newspapers as the latest of Baracka Obama’s failed appointees, his candidacy typically brief.
On Feb. 19, someone anonymously revealed that Freeman was to chair the National Intelligence Council, which co-ordinates reports from espionage agencies. Immediately, he became a subject of furious controversy among bloggers. Their views reached politicians, who began expressing doubts about him. The White House decided not to spend political capital defending him, so this week he withdrew his name. Then he issued a bitter denunciation of “the Israel lobby” for libelling him.
He’s now only a footnote in Washington political history but the Freeman incident raises interesting issues. It casts more doubt on the Obama White House’s hiring practices and reveals that Israel has some notable enemies within the U.S. government. As a drama performed mainly in the blogosphere, it demonstrates blogging’s influence on national politics. And in displaying Freeman’s connections, it reminds us never to underestimate Arab influence in Washington.”
“What impressed me about the blogging on this occasion was that much of it, pro-Freeman or anti-Freeman, came from long-established publications, including weeklies like The New Republic, Time and The Weekly Standard, all of which publish blogs by their various writers. Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, for instance, had plenty of time to criticize Freeman, get criticized in return for that, then respond to his withdrawal. From 1857 until recent times, The Atlantic Monthly came out once a month. Now, responding to news every morning, it should properly be called The Atlantic Daily, or maybe, during hectic news periods, The Atlantic Hourly.
National Post
robert.fulford@utoronto.ca”
urlm.in/bxig
Table of Income Tax Rates in China for an Individual in 2008
Tax % Monthly Income (CNY)
5% 1 – 500
10% 501 – 2,000
15% 2,001 – 5,000
20% 5,001 – 20,000
25% 20,001 – 40,000
30% 40,001 – 60,000
35% 60,001 – 80,000
40% 80,001 – 100,000
45% 100,001 and above
Capitol Gains rate = 20 %
I’m getting a bit of a chuckle listening to these lectures that Vit does such a good job of posting. In a way they remind me of blind people exploring the various parts of an elephant. One blind man exploring the trunk exclaims, “It’s long, round, swings and can lift great weight.”
“I know its an elephant”, explains the only sighted person in the room.
“Oh elephants don’t really exist”, says the first blind man as he continues his exploration.
A second blind man exclaims, “It’s flat and floppy as he explores the elephant’s ears.”
“Yes”, says the sighted man, “it’s an elephant”.
“Elephants don’t exist”, says the second blind man.
A third blind man says, “It’s long, round and carries great weight”, as he holds the elephant’s leg.
“Yes”, says the sighted man, “It’s an elephant”.
“Everyone knows that elephants don’t exist”, says the third blind man.
Everyone of these lectures fit into the Christian concept of the Omnipotent, Omniscient, Omnipresent God we call Yahweh but of course all ‘scientists’ know that God doesn’t exist regardless of what theologians might say.
“Bill Maher: ‘The Racism is Coming from Rush Limbaugh’
Did you know that the racism in our country is coming from Rush Limbaugh?
That’s what HBO’s Bill Maher said on Friday’s “Real Time.”
Not just that, but also the people who are buying guns and ammunition since Election Day are doing so “because they’re afraid that Obama and his Negro army are going to come and get” them.
I kid you not.
Such offenses occurred in the following exchange between Maher and his conservative guest Andrew Breitbart (video embedded below the fold, relevant section at 2:37).”
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2206610/posts
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“Barack Obama fuels gun buying boom with pledge to tighten laws (telegraphUK)
A pledge by US President Barack Obama to tighten gun control laws has led to firearms sales soaring across America.
Manufacturers are struggling to keep up with demand, and many gun shops running low on stock as the US public buys weapons in anticipation of tighter controls.
On the campaign trail last year Mr Obama proposed restoring a Clinton-era ban on several types of military-style semi-automatic rifles and high-capacity magazines, as well as background checks for buyers at gun shows, and other “common-sense measures”.
His pledge has proved a potent catalyst, with manufacturers recording soaring profits since his election.”
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2206626/posts
Entertainment – pure entertainment. Learned nothing. Pimping to the audience about their intelligence? Spare me.
Goreacle sees the hand writing on the wall*.
Is Gore a Baptist preacher?
As Yogi Berra said:
“It gets late early out there.”
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“Guardian: Al Gore says “business leaders see the writing on every wall they look at””
Above: Al’s high five on ice caps (gone in five years)
In today’s Guardian, Al Gore is quoted as saying:
[…]
Gore says he has also detected a shift in the view of many business leaders. “They’re seeing the writing on every wall they look at. They’re seeing the complete disappearance of the polar ice caps right before their eyes in just a few years,” .
He also acknowledged something important about his scientific limitations :
Responding to James Lovelock, the originator of the Gaia theory, who said the European trading system for carbon was “disastrous”, Gore says: “James Lovelock has forgotten more about science than I will ever learn. “
Given that sea ice area at the poles is right at the 30 year mean (red line below,) one might conclude that Gore’s first comment is baseless and that his second comment about his own limited learning potential, is correct.”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/03/14/guardian-al-gore/#comments
(*”Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin”. See Rembrandt’s ‘Belshazzar’s Feast’ (1635))
I agree with Tenebris, in terms of what Tenebris is talking about, and I agree with ET, in terms of what ET is talking about. (Joe, on the other hand, is just being silly: omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent elephants do not exist.) What I don’t understand, though, is how ET and Tenebris can claim to be disagreeing with each other, since they’re talking about different things.
Indeed, Vitruvius – you have hit upon my chief complaint. I object to the co-opting of technical and scientific terminology, whose domains of application have been very carefully defined, into fields unsuited for them. As a semioticist, ET should be particularly sensitive to this. It baffles me that she is not.
That’s because you’re talking about different things.
tenebris – the field of information dynamics, which is a vital aspect of studying CAS or complex adaptive systems, is not co-opting technical and scientific terminology unsuited to its analysis.
You may consider that communication is confined to differentiated ‘bits’ defined as information, but …
people working in physics, chemistry, biology and yes, computers and robotics, understand these terms very differently. And, they do consider that atomic particles are units of information, and are in informational interaction with other units. Same with cells. Furthermore, the informational process is understood to function in different ‘modes’ of space and time, including potential or ‘virtual’ interactions as well as actual.
And, from your comment, you also don’t understand semiotics. You are probably confusing it with semiology, which refers to language. The semiotics I’m dealing with refers to informational processes in physical and chemical interactions (atoms, molecules), in biological processes (cells, individual organisms and whole species) – and in other complex systems such as societies.
Absolutely nothing, nothing, to do with language or terms. Everything to do with informational generation and the formation of both particular ‘bits’ of information (an atom, a molecule, a cell, a plant, a species) and common patterns of formation (the chemical pattern, the DNA etc).
Oh – and that this whole communication process is a complex knowledge system. It actually generates knowledge, which is understood as the infrastructure of, for example, a species.
Oy.
ET – “behavioural relations”?! You wound me! I admit the charge of patriarchalism, as strictly defined. I do, indeed, take the authoritarian line with my children…generally a stentorian “children, remember who’s boss in these four walls…your mother!” 🙂 However, to imply the caricatured definition of the feminazi left (I must one day listen to Rush) is to seriously impugn my status as a gentleman. This seriously pisses off my wife…and my four daughters.
T’is blessed I am…a positively pampered papa 🙂
Moving on…
I’ve lapsed into nominalism? (Reload needle gun ) My dear (he says in a tone of condescending distraction), I’m merely asserting rigor of definition.
🙂
Seriously, I’ve spent the last 20+ years in the hard complex systems arena, dealing with the relationship between spatiotemporal measurements and transport properties, material response and atom-photon interaction. I object to your field employing my language in ways not intended.
Indulgences are a scam.
What’s new? John Huss* and Martin Luther said that centuries past.
…-
“Lovelock labels Europe’s carbon trading scheme a ‘scam’
Gaia scientist joins former minister Michael Meacher in saying ‘disastrous’ scheme has profited industry but not helped to reduce emissions”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/mar/10/lovelock-meacher-slam-carbon-trading
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*Who is John Huss and why he was killed? | Answerbag.com
Following a controversy over the selling of indulgences, Hus was tried for heresy … Luther was known as a spirit of John Huss so to speak.”
ET – “You may consider that communication is confined to differentiated ‘bits’ defined as information, but …”
Nope. Having worked as a telecomm enginer doesn’t mean that I are one 🙂
“people working in physics, chemistry, biology and yes, computers and robotics, understand these terms very differently.”
Yes, unfortunately. The curse of babel …
“Oh – and that this whole communication process is a complex knowledge system. It actually generates knowledge, which is understood as the infrastructure of, for example, a species.”
Mep! Delete…Delete…Delete…Breathe.
In the spirit of rational enquiry, two questions:
(1) WHAT “generates knowledge”?
(2) What is knowledge?
tenebris – huh – since when is terminology confined to one particular discipline? And who’se the boss of its intended usage?
And I’d bet that your spatiotemporal measurements refer to classical forces, such as kinetic force, volition, reaction, etc, etc. You are dealing with communication of existent properties of an entity that affect and may be affected by other existent properties of another entity.
The information processes I and my colleagues are dealing with is morphological; it deals with the ontological AND epistemological formation of the ‘existential’ rather than with how that existential interacts and communicates, as itself, with other entities. We only get interested when the interactions actually change the morphology.
Nominalism doesn’t have anything to do with definitions but is a perspective that focuses on individual units as the only reality and ignores the relations and the more basic infrastructural pattern-of-organization that moulds the individual units.
As for daughters, I’m sure you know that daughters are like cats (I speak speculatively as I have sons)…You may think that you are the boss of the cat, but all cats know, perfectly well, that they are in total control of you and to such an extent that you, poor sod, don’t even know it.
Now – I’m off for a break to watch something silly on TV.
I agree, Tenebris. What generates knowledge, and what is knowledge, which is an interesting recursion termination critera, don’t you think? On the other hand, who is on second. And, ET, for silly TV, just wait until you see tonight’s SDA LNR, featuring Kate, Tenebris, you, and me, which is scheduled to be broadcast one hour and 56 minutes from now.
“From your comment, you also don’t understand semiotics. You are probably confusing it with semiology…” — ET
I’d be surprised if more than one in ten thousand SDA readers is knowledgeable about semiotics or comes here to see someone with a doctorate in the field engaging in an extended argument/debate about semiotics in a Reader Tips thread.
Perhaps you could periodically provide a link or two to a primer-level essay on semiotics, if there is such a thing? And if there’s not such a thing, well then…
As much as I have lambasted Harpr latley for his turnabouts. He dosent deserve this hachet job from the Red Star. If you want to see sly insinuations this is the piece to read. Also, is it a good idea to stir up trouble between Harper & Obama? Only the America haters know for sure.
Also its all supposition. If you read Harpers speech, it implies noting this rag avers to.
PM lets fly on Liberals, Obama in closed speech
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http://www.thestar.com/News/Canada/article/602320
Harper predicts more job losses
Prime minister Stephen Harper says more Canadians are going to lose their jobs this year.
Mar 14, 2009 04:30 AM
Comments on this story (40)
Richard J. Brennan
OTTAWA BUREAU
Well, one in a thousand, EBD, but more importantly, perhaps, I think you just earned yourself the role of the Courier, from Vice Porterhouse, who delivers the question in tonight’s upcoming SDA LNR show 😉
tenebris – in answer (my answers) to your two questions –
Knowledge is, as a ‘thing in itself’, the patterns of organization of a collective. So, for the hydrogen atom, knowledge can be understood as the continuity (synchronicity)of organization of all hydrogen atoms; namely, 1 proton and 1 electron. This is ‘knowledge’. Note that the atom’s knowledge exists objectively. It is real. It doesn’t require a human observer to ‘know’ it or describe it.
What generates knowledge, or, what generates the pattern of organization of a collective? Ahh, the great question of the emergence of a collective, as a pattern of organization, be it hydrogen or the lion species.
Partly chance, which is constrained by information about existing knowledge; partly informational relations with other existing knowledge (preferential attachment, proximate cause), so that similar patterns of organization with just slight adaptations to specific niches will spread throughout a domain. Constraints and tactics of morphological formation operate via ‘quorum sensing’ between cells and other sensing of molecules.
In other words, a new mode of knowledge or pattern of organization emerges from within the collective, as a process of information sensing of itself and of its environment, and information development. This is, as I’m sure you know, self-organized generation of knowledge. A new pattern emerges when a threshold of information is reached – and the pattern ‘flips’ from one mode to another. You probably know about self-organization and complex systems anyway.
I maintain that this process also occurs in human societies.
EBD – heck, one learns something every day, and information and knowledge processes are basic to our understanding of societal systems. I may lump ‘information and knowledge processes and networks and complex adaptive systems’ under one theme of ‘semiotics’ but I hope that you don’t reject exploring these areas. After all, societies are networks of information and knowledge processes!
Thar she blows!
A single hydrogen atom doesn’t exist. Excuse me, probably doesn’t exist…but don’t worry; you needn’t even worship in Copenhagen. Our description of its nature and extent is entirely probabilistic. I shan’t ring any Bells, but sometimes there just are limits. Thus, when from on high we consider two hydrogen atoms, the exchange of virtual photons is a realization of a chain of discrete symmetry breakings that expresses the very nature of reality, albeit incompletely. Time and its arrow hast slain many a foe that wouldst gainsay Gödel.
Gainsay Gödel? Not me! Indeed, I think that he, along with Church, Turing, Shannon, von Neumann, and Mandlebrot are the most important figures of the 20’th century. I’m leaving the question of Wolfram to the 21’st century 😉
Rich,
Delicious!!
Thanks, I didn’t know about the Twilight Zone episode. I’ve never watched TZ, about time I should 😉
tenebris – of course a single hydrogen atom exists; if it didn’t, then, the hydrogen molecule, of two atoms, wouldn’t exist.
You are confining ‘existence’ to only one mode; ‘actuality’ or discrete spatiotemporal forms. I include the potential (probabilistic) as a MODE of existence. And no, this is not the Copenhagen perspective but is a mode that operates in a measurement of non-local space and progressive rather than perfect time. Rather Aristotelian. And, very much Charles Peirce.
How does Godel come into this? The Formal mode IS real – and the actual expressions of this Formal mode can never duplicate or fully express this Formal mode.