Yes, Tiffany Cross - Frmr. Speaker Boehner Slammed in ‘Dear John’ Letter

 

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Bernard Farrell - The Wedding Anniversary

The Wedding Anniversary

Drama On One presents the world premiere of a brand spanking new comedy by Bernard Farrell.

Jack and Deirdre are happily married ... well sort of. After a little tension creeps in (on whether Leixlip is a centre of medical excellence or not) ... they decide to ... surprise each another!

Stephen Brennan was Jack

Deirdre was played by Janet Moran

Peter Gaynor played Malcolm, the Counsellor

Venetia Bowe was Tracy

Johnny Thunder was played by Bryan Murray

Sound engineer Mark Mc Grath

Produced by Kevin Reynolds

If I ever had the misfortune to fall in love again at my age one of the first things I'd have to make sure is that he didn't care about anniversaries, birthdays, and I'd make him promise never to plan any kind of a surprise and especially a surprise party for me. There's a reason they figure so heavily in comedies of misfortune.

I'd try the Podcast button at the link, it's the most reliable way to listen and it gives you access to other plays if this one isn't for you.

 

The Modest (and correct) Claims Of Eddington Are Contradicted In The Totalizing Ideology Of Materialistic Scientism Which Is The Faith Of Modernism

IN THIS LITTLE STUDY of one of Eddington's lectures about just what the most accomplished field of modern science has achieved my motive is to point out just how limited that very impressive accomplishment is and what it consists of. And their limits.

 

Other sciences, chemistry, biology, are often said to rely entirely on what physics has shown and that's true to some extent but I would bet that in their study of complex molecules and what they do, what might be effectively the more infinitely complex study of living organisms, their bodies, their lives, their species, genera,etc. their environment, etc. what is of most pressing interest to theoretical and even particle physics is probably of next to no importance.

I suspect that the ideology of materialist reductionism that has a faith that everything real is reducible to the smallest unit is wrong. I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out there is no single smallest unit, as a start. Previously and as recently as the turn of the 20th century that neo-atomist ideology was a philosophical-ideological position that even some of the finest people working as scientists and philosophers of science didn't hold (you could go look at Ludwig Boltzmann and his opponents for that). From how the science developed it's only reasonable to believe that what they study is real, though I doubt their view of those tiny bits of matter-energy is as nearly complete and comprehensive as they like to believe it is, but I think the higher levels dealing with larger objects and plants and creatures not really well thought of as objects are as real, and the physical aspects of those studies are as real as the presumably more enduring realities of electrons, protons, and even their smaller constituent particles which are, as well, not relevant to the most important aspects of human life. I think our material culture would have been quite different, no doubt our use of electronics and some of the aspects of the use of things like X-rays in medicine, etc. would have been different if physics had not developed in the way it did. If atomic theory had not been developed we would certainly not have developed nuclear weapons and nuclear power which may yet kill us all, for example. But if our material culture had not developed the way it did human lives and cultures would still have most of its pressing problems to fix else we all perish. I kind of think that our species surviving and living a decent life is what we are more properly concerned with than the speculations of recent and, pretty much, totally theoretical physics and cosmology. I think that the culture of college-credentialed lefties and even many of the vestiges of traditional American style liberalism - NOT the same thing as 18th century European style liberalism - has been rotted out by being distracted from what it should be doing.

It was one of the most shocking things going online and being exposed to the thinking of college credentialed people, unedited, in such large numbers just how daffy some of the most conceited of those people are. That the "new atheism" came in with the attacks of 911 opened up the problem that ideological atheism, which as it developed is intrinsically tied to the atomic theory first invented with the motive of promoting atheism in ancient Greece and India and, no doubt elsewhere and the reductionist materialism that arose with the human invention of scientific methods in the late medieval period and gained steam in the miscalled "enlightenment". I will admit I was also kind of shocked at how superficial a level of thinking so much of the contemporary culture consists of. I think that is related to the nihilism of materialism but I won't go into that again right now.

And it is so practically counterproductive. I had to conclude from what the new atheists said that their obsessive hatred of religion and God and, especially Christianity was more important to so many of these college credentialed people that they really had no interest in winning elections and establishing the egalitarian democracy that they pretended to care about, otherwise, why would they so gratuitously alienate so many voters over totally unimportant and largely make believe offenses. I did come to the conclusion that that was a major aspect of a larger, overriding aspect of class and, to some extent, regional snobbery which did nothing to expand the Democratic voter base, either. But it was one my reading and interest helped me to see through not long into my reading of the unedited thoughts of such college-credentialed snobs. My long study of the relationship of Darwinism with eugenics in opposition to the post-WWII lie that those had nothing to do with each other, and as soon as I started reading the primary literature, the relationship of Darwinism to Nazism was a branch of the same study in self-defeating lefty idiocy which was one of the results of observing American lefties unedited, unfiltered thinking.

Life is complicated, I think too complicated to be dealt with comprehensively by science and certainly not reducible in the way that atheist-materialist-scientism insists it is. Even if their hunch is true, human science has certainly not come anywhere close to a beginning of demonstrating that, though even now it is the absolutist faith of most atheists that it is known to be true and that they have come close to knowing the non-mind of their no-god, and, as it turns out, that mind is not expressed in the absolutes that would be necessary to produce the absolute material base of everything but in the mathematics of vague probability.

I needed to get that off my chest, the ever calm and not frustrated Eddington continued with a vegan - and sheep - unfriendly example of very real human experiences that science can't begin to touch.

We shall refer to this abstraction as the mathematical concept of structure, or briefly as the concept of structure. Since the structure abstracted from whatever posses the structure can be exactly specified by mathematical formulae, our knowledge of structure is communicable, whereas much of our knowledge is incommunicable. I cannot convey to you the vivid knowledge which I have of my own sensation and emotions. There is no way of comparing my sensation of the taste of mutton with your sensation of the taste of mutton. I can only know what it tastes like to me, and you can only know what it tastes like to you. But if we are both looking at a landscape, although there is no way of comparing our visual sensations as such, we can compare the structures of our respective visual impressions of the landscape. It is possible for a group of sensations in my mind to have the same structure of a group of sensations in your mind. It is possible also that a group of entities which are not sensations in anyone's mind, associated together by relations of which we can form no conception, may have this same structure. We can therefore have structural knowledge of that which is outside of everyone's mind. This knowledge will consist of the same kind of assertions as those which are made about the physical universe in the modern theories of mathematical physics. For strict expression of physical knowledge, a mathematical form is essential, because that is the only way in which we can confine its assertions to structural knowledge. Every path to knowledge of what lies beneath the structure is then blocked by an impenetrable mathematical symbol.

Physical science consists of purely structural knowledge so that we know only the structure of the universe which it describes. This is not a conjecture as to the nature of physical knowledge; it is preciesly what physical knowledge as formulated in present-day theory states itself to be. . .

I'll break in here to point out that Eddington is not only saying but admitting that there are real and important limits in what science deals with for the motive of coming up with knowledge of some things which can then be communicated with fewer ambiguities to other scientists. In that he is recapitulating the development of scientific methods, the measurement of closely observed phenomena in order to come up with desired, though inevitably limited seemingly objective knowledge of them - leaving aside the fact that the act of observation introduces an inevitably subjective activity within that, not to mention those coming into it through measurement - perhaps the uncertainty that modern physics finds comes into their activities through observation and measurement are them coming up against the hard fact that what they do is not totally objective. I would point out that it also means that though they might agree on everything, their agreement on what they observe and measure can never be total no more than the photons that someone is receiving when they look at the landscape he posits will be the same one coming in at the same angle will be to the person standing next to him. Even the closest science is only held to be uniform, one person to another, in so far as they agree to agree on that. That's not a problem if they are careful not to try to use their agreed to abstractions to make stuff up, especially stuff made up out of ideological or other motives and scientists have been doing that from almost the start. Today, especially in the theoretical branches of science, it's totally out of hand, entire branches of science and especially the pseudo-sciences coming up with stuff that is not observed at all, the numbers being more imaginary than the square root of negative one is considered to be.

In fundamental investigations the conception of group-structure appears quite explicitly as the starting point; and nowhere in the subsequent development do we admit material not derived from group-structure.

The fact that structural knowledge can be detached from knowledge of the entities forming the structure gets over the difficulty of understanding how it is possible to conceive a knowledge of anything which is not part of our own minds. So long as the knowledge is confined to assertions of structure, it is not tied down to any particular realm of content. It will be remembered that we have separated the question of the nature of knowledge from the question of assurance of its truth. We are not here considering how it is possible to be assured of the truth of knowledge relating to something outside of our minds; we are occupied with the prior question how it is possible to make any kind of assertions about things outside our minds, which (whether true or false) has a definable meaning.

I would go on to say that here Eddington is being quite unrealistic about what science in reality is because science is only what scientists say it is at any given point in any given area. Sometimes it is as careful and precise and modest in its assertions as Eddington, rightly, says it SHOULD be, in reality it is far less true now than it was even when Eddington gave this lecture in 1938, during which time science was chock full of racist, class-driven (especially in Britain) notions of the application of natural selection to the human population, eugenics. I don't know what Eddington thought of eugenics but it was (and remains) firmly embedded in science. In 1938 scientists who had arrived at a professional agreement on eugenics due to their total belief in the reality of natural selection were looking hopefully on the Nazi's applications of it, Charles Davenport and other American scientists were fully on board and cooperating with the Nazis. Yet the existence of natural selection was known only in the communications of scientists, it has never been observed except in the most ambiguous of self-interested assertion by scientists and, when their claims are rigorously considered, major flaws in their claims arise in what they left out. It is hardly a rigorous example of the scientific method that Eddington claimed for his branch of science along with his modest claims for it.

I think what Eddington also has done here is to bring modern science back to the ambitions of Descartes and those in his generation to give the study of nature the same level of agreed to finality that can be achieved in pure mathematics, the level of mathematics that consists of tight proofs of claims about numbers and objects. I have pointed out any number of times that there is something extremely interesting in the fact that the only things for which human beings have that level of tight proof, universally agreed on - when those who can understand it understand the claims and have tested them out - are for things which are not known to exist anywhere but in the imagination of human beings. But the limits of what can be done in that way were almost instantly ignored in claiming the total potency of the methods of science to make it a totalizing system of ideology, economics, politics, etc. Mathematics is what Thomas Hobbes, the evangelist of violent depravity, constructed his faith from, As John Wallis noted that was "the mathematics from which he takes his courage" but which he understood certainly far less than the Reverend Wallis did. Karl Marx, in his second evaluation of natural selection - after he started having qualms that it was not merely the boon to the promotion of atheism and materialism that made him first recommend it to Engels - noted that natural selection was a reproduction of the British class system, turning Malthus on its head to assert that his economics is inverted and applied to all of nature. Marx correctly noted that natural selection is a recapitulation of Hobbes' "war of all against all." If you want to see how right he was, read Haeckel's The History of Creation to see just how depraved and totalizing a claim it was, Haeckel declared Darwinism to assure the total victory of his own materialist monism, apparently with no objection from Darwin who endorsed that book as science in the highest possible terms.

At the same time Eddington was giving his lectures, physicists and chemists in a number of other countries were about to embark on the application of recent physics to produce atomic bombs based on the same science that Eddington had collaborated in. He would certainly have suspected they were doing that. I am not that close a student of the Quaker, Eddington, to have any idea what he thought of that as he gave his lectures.

Kurt Rosenwinkle - Zhivago

 

Kurt Rosenwinkel – guitar

Mark Turner – tenor saxophone

Ben Street – bass

Jeff Ballard – drums

Footnote On The Danger Of Overextending Mathematics Where It Can't Go

HISTORY PROVIDES an excellent example of the stupidity of trying to treat more complex life mathematically or, rather, "scientifically" and, I would point out, the frequency with which such a treatment will, oddly, enough, result in results which the "scientist" so doing will find agrees with what they wanted to find EXACTLY IN THAT POPULAR PHILOSOPHER OF POLITICAL-ECONOMIC DEPRAVITY, THOMAS HOBBES.   

When he stupidly claimed to publish a proof of how to square the circle and got into a quarter century long brawl with a real mathematical genius who mopped the floor with him but who, not popularizing a particularly brutal materialistic philosophy of use to modern tyrants, despots, businessmen, billionaires, depraved university scribblers, why Hobbes is still cited while he isn't remembered much today, The Reverend John Wallis.

Respected mathematician John Wallis was among those who didn’t like Hobbes or his ideas. Wallis might have kept his contempt to himself. But then Hobbes dabbled in Wallis’ domain–mathematics. Euclid’s Elements– a marvelous work of pure deductive reasoning– captivated Hobbes. So much so, it even influenced his political philosophy. Hobbes wanted to reason his way to truth- just like mathematicians a lofty goal, even if he couldn’t possibly achieve it.

But where Hobbes got into trouble was trying to solve real, bona fide mathematical problems. Hobbes claimed he could “square a circle”: using only a compass and straight edge, construct a square and a circle with the same area. The problem was first posed by Euclid, but he couldn’t solve it. Many people played with it over the centuries. Many people offered false proofs. Turns out it’s not possible to square a circle. Mathematicians proved this in the late nineteenth century.

So Hobbes was wrong. And the mathematician Wallis tore into him – not just Hobbes’ math, but the “poisonous filth” he “vomited.” Wallis dissected Hobbes’ arguments, viciously ridiculing them one by one. He savored showing the world “how little [Hobbes] understands the mathematics from which he takes his courage.”

Hobbes returned the favor, attempting to refute Wallis’ claims and referring to Wallis’ writings as “mere ignorance and gibberish.” Thus began one of the great feuds in the history of science. Name calling, slander. The bickering continued off and on until Hobbes’ death almost a quarter century later.

My conclusion is that once he stupidly put his foot in it, Hobbes didn't dare to admit to error BECAUSE, LIKE THE FAR MORE LIKABLE SPINOZA, HIS ENTIRE SYSTEM DEPENDED ON BOTH THE PERFECTION OF MATHEMATICS AND ITS ENTIRE POTENCY IN EVERYTHING.  He knew that to find even one thing it couldn't do would be to endanger his entire system.  And I've always thought he was one of the biggest assholes in the history of Western philosophy who encouraged even bigger ones outside of it in real life. 

Shadows Of Hobbes, Mandeville and Nietzsche And The Over Extension of Science

ONE OF THE EARLY pieces I posted on line used a little elementary algebra to make a point about the kind of calculation that liberal politicians had to go through to decide if an issue a group of their constituents or others was interested in was worth the cost it would inevitably be to them if they championed that issue. 

 

I called it " They Can Hold Their Breath Long As They Want That Won’t Turn The Country Blue Single Issue Politics,"

and thought it was brilliant and elegant in its obvious simplicity. Readers were unimpressed. I remember someone at the time telling me even that much math was too much because peoples' eyes glazed over as soon as numbers and an equals sign were introduced. 

 

They wanted no more than a number maybe with a percent or dollar sign attached to it, that was the extent to their desire to have numbers attached to things. I think that accounts for why Jim Jordan kept haranguing Dr. Fauci for a number last week when Dr. Fauci, not willing to lie with numbers wouldn't give him that kind of lie even at the cost of knowing Jordan and the worst of the Republican-fascist caucus in the Congress would use his refusal to lie against him and the American People.

As recently as yesterday I was going to leave out the mere descriptions of the more complex math that A. S. Eddington gives MERELY AS EXAMPLES of the kind of mathematical structuring that is the very heart of modern science, though I think he really meant by that modern physics and cosmology more than the sciences that deal with things on the atomic, molecular level, chemistry, and the legitimately called life sciences. I think that kind of thing gets turned on its head not infrequently in the pseudo-social sciences such as psychology and numbers are used to lie in a way that Jim Jordan was insisting on, not to mention even more dishonestly and ideologically in economics and sociology.

I'm thinking that my original intention of going through A. S. Eddington's well developed logical arguments in The Concept of Structure from The Philosophy of Physical Science is not going to work the way I had hoped it would due to eye-glazing. My original inspiration was to present it to counter some of the perennial objections to my anti-materialism that come in whenever I get close to violating that enforced requirement of respectability. Eddington's arguments are always strong though when he chooses to make them through the modern physics of the early 20th century, they quickly stop being effective as a means of persuading most people.

I am tempted to go to his conclusions, the ones he comes to along the way and his later ones that incorporate those. Those are the things important to my point about the absurdity that thinking even the grooviest of current physics is going to come up with anything like a complete explanation of everything. But I'm going to use Eddington's complete argument for as long as its useful. I'm not even sure exactly how current some of it is but it would have been at the time he was making his points and I don't think those have aged at all. So here goes.

A terminable set of operations, or as it is technically called a group, has a structure which can be described mathematically. The fact that the operation which changes P into Q is always another member R of the group furnishes a set of triangular connections as the groundwork of the structure. These triangular connections that interlace in a great variety of patterns; and it is the pattern of the interlacing which constitutes the abstract structure. The mathematical description of the group specifies only the pattern of interlacing, and pays no attention to the physical nature of the operations with the same group structure, and therefore equivalent so far as mathematical description is concerned.

Which is not that shocking, though it might lead you to consider not the validity of what they are doing but in the more outlandish claims made that, in effect, the mathematical description of things does, in fact, determine the physical nature and, really everything, about the things they use mathematics to study. I think a lot of the rasher claims for what they can figure out using this level of mathematics is an act of faith in the potency of this mathematical treatment to envelop everything about anything when, as Eddington said, it is unable to go beyond that point. 

 

The usefulness of what Descartes started, the power of it has made us forget the limits of what is claimed for it. The absurdity rises entirely when they want to make it do things it can't do and which only sometimes can be tested with the methods of science. They should admit when that is not possible and so there is no possibility of verification of their thinking, and it's not only a problem on the subatomic level and farther down but when phenomena of life are too complex, too hidden from observation, too diffuse to capture or, in some cases, to even know if there is a phenomenon there or if it's the product of the not infrequently self-interested scientist or social-scientist wanting to make claims about it.

Going on, you'll see the problem with using the complete lecture to make my point.

One of the important groups in physics is the group of rotations in six dimensions. There are fifteen independent planes of rotation in six-dimensional space (corresponding to the three independent planes of rotation in three-dimensional space); and since we have always to add the operation of "leaving things as they are", which is an ex officio member of every group, we have sixteen elements with which to form a group-structure. A definite interlocking patter is constituted by the association of these elements (other than the ex officio element) in six sets of five (pentads), each element being a member of two pentads. Interlacing with it is an association of the elements in triads, the triads themselves being associated in conjugate pairs. Each of the fifteen elements plays an equivalent part in the pattern.

Rotation in six dimensions is only one of many sets of operations which yield this particular group-pattern. For example, if we place four different coins on the table, the operations of interchanging them in pairs, with or without turning one pair the other way up, form a group with this structure. The same pattern of relations turns up in the geometry of Kummer's Qadratic Surface, in the theory of Theta Functions, and - most important of all for our purposes - the specification of an elementary particle (proton or electron) in an elementary state, including the specification of its charge and spin.

If, by the end of that your eyes were glazing over, well, I would imagine that may have been the case of many of Eddington's audience for the lecture. Eddington was one of the most accomplished mathematical minds in England and the world, at the time. Even very accomplished mathematicians will have entire realms of mathematical thought to which they are not even novices, it being such a huge and hugely varied field. We mere mortals have to take what the ones who are masters of the currently accepted applications of their mathematics as knowing what they're talking about, we, like even very accomplished mathematicians and scientists in unrelated fields, are reliant on their honesty and integrity which is, of course, based in nothing to do with this but with their sense of morality. Eddington was an extremely moral person who I wish would have written more about the relationship of his moral reliability to his Quakerism which doesn't seem to have been at all diminished by his learning in science and mathematics. I can tell you that from what I've read of his life and his reputation, I would trust him a lot more than some of his colleagues who rejected the foundations of morality on the basis of their knowledge of mathematics and physics and biology.

Properly to realize the conception of group-structure, we must think of the pattern of interweaving as abstracted altogether from the particular entities and relations that furnish the pattern. In particular, we can give an exact mathematical description of the pattern, although mathematics may be quite inappropriate to describe what we know of the nature of the entities and operations concerned in it. In this way mathematics gets a footing in knowledge which intrinsically is not of a kind suggesting mathematical conceptions. Its function is to elucidate the group-structure of the elements of that knowledge. It dismisses the individual elements by assigning to them symbols, leaving it to non-mathematical thought to express the knowledge, if any that we may have of what the symbols stand for.

If you can't see the problem with that practice WHEN IT IS APPLIED TO NOT ONLY THINGS WHICH CAN'T HONESTLY BE TREATED THAT WAY BUT, ALSO WHEN MATHEMATICS  IS USED TO CREATE AN ILLUSION OF A SUBSTRATE OF A STRUCTURE BEING REAL YOU SHOULD LOOK AT WHAT MUCH OF THEORETICAL PHYSICS HAVE BEEN DOING FOR THE PAST FOUR DECADES* and what the social sciences have done on a continuing basis whenever a lot of mathematics is used to support the existence of things which not infrequently have been deemed later to have been illusory. It may well be that one of the most frequently pursued and sited "phenomena" of psychology in recent years, ego depletion, is such an illusion. And on such illusions rests a great deal of current racist, class-discriminatory public policy which blights the lives of hundreds of millions if not billions, of which the racist "Bell Curve" of Herrenstein and Murray and championed by the likes of Andrew Sullivan is based. The entire history of the use of "IQ" at least in the Anglo-American manner is based on a far more primitive use of mathematics divorced from the actual things it was alleged to do.  

It does get even more interesting, among other reasons, for showing just how limited an "everything" the allegedly almost in hand "theory (theories, really) of everything," ideologically proclaimed and used by even physicists who should know better but, especially, ideologically motivated cosmologists, how not "everything" their theories and the applications of their proposed rock bottom "TOE" or unified-theory will be. Yet they make the most outlandish claims about what they are on the cusp of producing. 

 

That started long, long ago, with the dawn of modern science when the current best knowledge supported that claim ever so much less and the habit was established. And all along the way, certainly as early as Mandeville in the early 18th century and even earlier and to even more lasting evil effect, Thomas Hobbes, extending then current science on a faith that, having an attachment to numbers extrapolated from their usefulness in measuring observations, using such imaginary structure to apply them where they never had any business going. I think my modest use of them, which I admitted was a thought experiment was on far firmer ground and to far better effect. But, then, my motives were to extend equality and the common good. Which didn't come from any math I knew or science. 

 

 It is supremely ironic and something visible in the "evangelical" and "prosperity gospel" Trump vote that the Hobbesian and Mandevillian thinking that starts in the ideological uses of 17th century science, or at least found its excuse through its misuse, seems to have thoroughly rotted out that most "Anglo-Saxon" branch of popular religion that mistakes itself for Christian in such a big way.  I'll add as a provocative observation on my part, passing up the opportunity to include Nietzsche, who I think is more of a shadow on the neo-con side of things.

 

* I will again mention what the world's favorite recent theoretical physicist and cosmologist, Stephen Hawking demanded, that his branch of universe creation through numbers be accepted as a valid part of physical science even though there is no possibility of finding evidence that such mathematical structures are anything more than imaginary.  I mention it so often because I thought it was offensively dishonest and because I thought it exposes the ideological nature of that kind of thing within science at its highest levels of accomplishment and repute.   As I argued, beginning with Hobbes and Mandeville, that kind of ideological use of science has the most devastating of consequences for morality and the production of a decent life, not in a small way by rotting out the culture of the educated class.

More Important Than The Eddington, Brueggemann on Getting Back To The More Radical Sinai From The More Respectable Heights Of Zion

 

This is what suggested to me that passage from Jeremiah that I cited last week which gives about as radical a means of knowing God as possible.  A means that is far more challenging than the typical "prove it" challenge because you have to do it for real in life instead of the irrelevant standards of natural science or mathematical logic, which, as I point out, by agreement left out the possibility of even taking up that question in the first place.  It's a lot more important than me going on with the Eddington and I don't have the time to do that right now, anyway.  I'm going to excerpt more of that later this week, I hope.

I'm Told We're Stupid Up Here

 

 

I never met Joe Perham but Gary Crocker's a friend of one of my relatives, I met him at my relative's birthday pahty.  He told me he knew Joe Perham, he said he was a fine gentleman. 

Kurt Rosenwinkel - Star of Jupiter

 

Kurt Rosenwinkel – guitar and vocals

Aaron Parks – piano

Eric Revis – bass

Justin Faulkner – drums

 

I love his work and I love this piece.  

I Love To Make White Straight Men Whine and Cry - Hate Mail

HAL DAVID AND BURT BACHARACH were skilled songwriters, for all I know Bacharach still is, I checked, he's still alive. This Guy's In Love With You is a very skillfully written song. It's definitely written to give the effect of "a guy" singing a love song.   

 

I once read a piece about "how to get rid of a gay accent" curious about what such advice would consist of, though if I wanted to get rid of an accent it would be my inland Maine accent and I don't want to.  The advice leaned heavily on making your voice as uninflected as possible, "giving as little away as you can", syllables as short as possible, not lingering on vowels, not altering the pitch on a vowel. Especially the way that Herb Alpert sings the songs it's a perfect example of how a guy should sing following that advice. Andy Williams and some of the other crooners, not so much. I think it was Debussy who complained there was too much singing at the opera. I think Herb Alpert often plays trumpet with a similar kind of articulation, a very dry "manly" articulation. Maybe it's the difference between someone who plays an instrument and sings and someone who just croons. 

 

I will say that most of the gay men I know talk like "guys" that way.  I don't, I talk like a backwoods hick.  Only drier.

That said, it isn't one of their songs that instruct women in how to be submissive to men, it's a man singing a love song, it wouldn't be one of those though he being a "guy" he's more about himself in that song than the women in those other songs all about "their men" are definitely not about themselves. Some of the ones that do carry that messaging are as bad as any of the atrocious pop songs with that content from the period, though much of what else followed in the 1990s to today is far more viciously pathological than that sinister though less overtly so time.

Now that I've said that, the meaning of lyrics is important. I was thinking that the other day when I was listening to an album of pieces played by Mary Lou Williams, one that included her masterful and ever fascinating variations on Limehouse Blues.

 

 

 

Years ago, I had only ever heard one recording of people singing Limehouse Blues, the great Mills Brothers from the early 1930s and was long ago appalled by the casual racism of the lyrics, so I was always uneasy about liking the tune and, even with what good improvisers do with it. It's one of the more popular standards for that with good jazz improvisers. I had to go online and look up the lyrics to find out that as sung by more modern artists, though they are far from up to modern standards of equality and non-stereotyping, they were no where near as racist as the original from exactly a century ago. I read that the song was originally from a London musical review with it being a piece set in a Limehouse district dance-hall-brothel.  I'd originally concluded it was about an opium den, but prostitution has always been closely associated with drug addiction.  I doubt most of the people who hear the melody as treated by jazz musicians have much of a sense of that connection.  You only get those through the words.

You can care about that kind of thing or not, I happen to and don't feel at all embarrassed to care about it. I can give Bachrarch and David their due while acknowledging the issues surrounding thier songs. 

 

Update:  Yep, I got him whining and crying.  He reminds me of this little gem.

 

 

 

 "It was a murder in the full light of day and it ripped the blinders off for the whole world to see the systemic racism. Systemic racism is a stain on the nation's soul."

MEMORY may be doing them an injustice but I can't recall anything either Bill Clinton or Barack Obama ever said on the subject in a similar context that went this far.    

The longer Joe Biden is president the more it feels like we may be in a really consequential presidency the like of which we have not had since the 1960s.   I only hope he can avoid the fate of LBJ in getting sidelined by the wise guys and whiz kids and the Republican-fascist dirty water-boys of the media. 

Going Out On A Limb - We Do It All The Time But We Should Make Sure There's Really A Limb There Before We Put Our Weight On It

WE ARE SO USED to considering the abstraction of physical objects and phenomena into numbers "data" or "coordinates" (not to mention words and stories) and thinking of the numbers and the varying values of numbers, pairs and sets of numbers that come from manipulating equations, indeed turning those back into abstracted "objects" in the form of lines and curves on graphs that are held to be real in themselves, that we never really think that what is being done is an act of abstraction removed from the physical reality of the objects and phenomena and not the things themselves. 

 

It seems extremely strange and insanely nit-picky when someone points out what we do, constantly. But that becomes important the more we want things from the more attenuated scientific practice of doing that, of course, including the question of God, the meaning of things beyond the everyday, the possibility of an afterlife. For my purposes as a political blogger, those issues of morality that are essential to my political ideology of egalitarian governance. And this is important.  

 

Consider how conservatives are ready to destroy all programs for the elevation of poor families, especially on the basis of race on the say so of a bunch of racist academics, journalists, stink tank hacks on the basis of an ideologically based bell curve, one of the most persistent obvious uses of this kind of thing for evil purposes sold on the repute of science.   If people understood what was being done, the habits of thought that we've developed through modern mathematics and their use in science, we'd all be a lot less vulnerable to that kind of manipulation.

 

I think that's what Eddington is doing in this section in so far as science and its position in human life, pointing out what we are doing, starting with the assignment of symbols for "things" which could turn into an infinite regression even before anything potentially useful is done.  As to my use of what he says, that may or may not be successful.  Though I think it's important.

To introduce mathematics we must somehow put a stop to the infinite regression of symbols. Such a termination will be reached if we find that the X, Y, Z, . . . are not new operations, but are already contained in the first set of operations P, Q, R, . . . that we introduced, that is to say, if we find that the same operation which changes one entity into another will also change one operation into another.

As an example,[ and only one such unrelated example] consider the operations of duplicating, triplicating, quadruplicating, etc. If these are taken as P, Q, R, . . . , we have next to consider, say, the operation Y which changes duplicating into quadruplicating. Quadruplication consists of two operations of duplication, i.e. of duplicating duplication. Thus the operation Y is duplicating, and has already been introduced as P. More generally if the set P, Q, R, . . . denotes all possible operations of multiplication, fractional as well as integral, the operations of changing P into Q, P into R, Q into R, etc. are also operations of multiplication, and therefore no new symbols are required.

I think the confusing part of Eddington's examples in this section are that he is using trios of letters to represent larger groups of operations, no doubt a mathematician of his enormous sophistication and the group of students and faculty he was addressing would understand that a lot more readily than we mere lay people. And they would have been far more familiar with the categories and operations he was talking about than those of us who use a little math from time to time and go for decades without thinking about even second year Algebra. At least that's the most obvious of the problems I had when I read it the first time and now, too and I occasionally have tutored people in math. Remember this lecture dealt with the concept of structure, it gets really interesting later in the chapter when he uses that to make some crucial points about the relationship of our consciousness to the physical world external of us.

And, as you read the following, forget about the example he just gave of the TYPES of abstraction that mathematics is often used for in science, certainly at times imposing structure on reality and not merely finding what's there. Sometimes, I would assert, making things up with equations and graphs of equations. Though not always, by any means. Especially not when there is an actual, observable, definable thing to keep the abstraction and creativity in check.

As another example, suppose that the initial entities A, B. C,. . . . are points on a sphere. The operation of changing one point on a sphere into another is a rotation of the sphere; thus the operations P, Q, R, are rotations. If P and Qu are rotations through equal angles in different planes, the one plane is changed into the other, and therefore P into Q, by another rotation, say R. If P and Q are rotations through unequal angles, one can be changed into the other by a combination of the operations of rotation and multiplication. Grouping together all possible operations of rotation and multiplication, no further operations are introduced in comparing one rotation with another.

We see therefore that there exist "terminable sets of operations" which do not lead to a regression of nomenclature of ever-increasing complexity. It is only through such terminable sets that mathematical thoughts can be introduced. To the extent to which the various portions of our experience can be related to one another in terms of these operations the form material for mathematical treatment . The full development of th idea, here briefly indicated, is contained in the Theory of Groups.*

* An elementary account of the theory of groups, and of the part it plays in the foundation of theoretical physics, is given in New Pathways in Science, Ch. XII

The chapter in New Pathways in Science, page 251 on the PDF, is worth looking at, especially the first couple of pages where Eddington used a fragment of The Jabberwocky taken as representing an unknown universe (or time) to more easily understood and somewhat more entertaining effect. I think it's more compelling because it more closely matches our world of sense, the reason that Lewis Carroll's doggerel is more interesting than the as absurd mathematical description of a successful marriage posted yesterday.

I think there are a number of problems with the ideal presentation of things in which scientists and those who understand them always make the fine distinctions between real things and the abstracted structural mathematical descriptions of them is too abstract in itself because scientists are constantly presenting their abstractions as the more real reality, indeed as I pointed out, some, and some of the most well regarded cosmologists these days, largely due to the quantum theory that Eddington points out this kind of thing is so useful for, insist that all of their abstract universes must be real.  To the extent that they seem to believe such things as Boltzmann's brains are real enough to introduce into their heated brawls over multiverses only sometimes admitted to having been invented by ideological cosmologists as a means of getting rid of God. And Boltzmann invented them before quantum theory had really precipitated out of turn-of-the-20th century physics out of some of the most insane mathematical speculation that overlooked little things like the impossibility of mathematically producing a description of "a brain" sufficient to plug its possible existence into a scheme of probability.   Who knows how improbable they are in an abstract model of thermodynamic flux?  But they still use them in arguing.

Yet they wonder why people have such a hard time taking their claims seriously, including those which are, actually, serious and important.  Though, as in the case of The Bell Curve, they take another type of the same thing as far too important. 

Betty Carter - Day Dream

 

Betty Carter • vocals

Geri Allen • piano

Dave Holland • bass

Jack DeJohnette • drums

It seemed like it would be more appropriate to post this during the day than at night. 

Answer To A Hissy Fit I Hadn't Intended To Entertain

SCIENCE USED TO BE defined as a set of methods followed in order to produce "objective reliable knowledge" about things. I think that's wishful thinking not only because there is no such thing as an objective view of things. That already sends the holders of scientistic ideology up a tree because their ideological positions are seriously damaged by that admission alone. They do that even as their own language gives away that they know that is the case. If you want to imagine that such an objective view is an absolute internal reproduction of things as they are, that should be "THE objective view" something that the use of the indefinite rather gives away as an impossible to achieve thing. And I'd love you to produce even two devoted materialist-scientistic experts who hold identical conceptions of any object within the purview of their expertise because, those conceptions being internal, they will never be identical. So what science deals with are agreed to, subjective conceptions of things and forces, etc. which are kept in bounds only through rigorous application of methods and the admission of when those are impossible to apply to what is desired to be studied, which, I think, is probably at least as important as the validity and rigor of the agreed to methods of science. And it is the first one to go out the window.

I think with all the problems it brings the only honest definition of science is that it's what scientists call science at any time, or what scientists allow to be called science because there is lots and lots of science that lots of scientists don't buy as valid science, even entire departments and schools in universities will not really have the respect of scientists in more rigorously scientific fields though they don't generally admit to it. If the public is gullible about the claims of such "science" and that that confusion is extended and exploited as we have seen - to the general damage to science and its public understanding - scientists share a good deal of the blame in that due to their allowing the social-sciences, science which exempts itself from the methods of science, etc. getting away with being called science in the first place.

The claim that I'm anti-science is absurd on its face when I've noted repeatedly that I have a problem when "science" is done, published and called "science" which doesn't follow the agreed to methods of science, sometimes in many different ways. I have repeatedly criticized everything from the impossibility of observation of claimed phenomena being filled in by the rankest of story telling to the demand by Stephen Hawking to allow science-fiction written in equations with no possibility of valid or even invalid testing of its claims in physical or empirical observation. The kind of thing that theoretical physicists and cosmologists, not to mention even earlier in the social so-called sciences pass off as science on a continuing basis.

That state of affairs was warned of 83 years ago by one of the most astute of that periods mathematical-scientific-philosophers Arthur Stanley Eddington during his Easter Term lectures published in The Philosophy of Physical Science. In chapter IX on The Concept of Structure he starts

Theoretical physics to-day is highly mathematical. Where does the mathematics come from? I cannot accept [James] Jean's view that mathematical conceptions appear in physics because it deals with a universe created by a Pure Mathematician; my opinion of pure mathematicians, though respectful, is not so exalted as that. An unbiased consideration of human experience as a whole does not suggest that either the experience itself or the truth revealed in it is of such a nature as to resolve itself spontaneously into mathematical conceptions. The mathematics is not there till we put it there. The question to be discussed in this chapter is, At what point does the mathematician contrive to get a grip on material which intrinsically does not seem particularly fitted for his manipulations?

So, even then the man who Einstein said had written the best mathematical treatment of his own theories, one of the preeminent mathematical physicists of that generation was considering what the immediately past and current generation of scientists does on a regular basis, especially in theoretical physics and cosmology but, also, in the life sciences and even more so in the academic lore that was allowed to get away with calling itself science when it never did science but, in its more sciency forms, figured pretending to do math about things that in no way were fitted for its manipulations tells you real things about reality. Not infrequently the things they did math about had no actual existence outside of their imaginations.

Rereading this chapter after a long time of not thinking about it makes me want to go through the whole thing here. It helped inform a lot of my skepticism about the more outlandish and ideological claims of scientists and gave me a lot more respect for science that is done well and of the fact that all of science as all of human thinking and work is imperfect, contingent, vulnerable to wishful thinking and error, and so fallible.

 

Oh heck, Eddington is worth reading so here goes.  Don't let the talk about notation get you too bogged down, it isn't even math yet.

 

If in a public lecture I use the common abbreviation No. for a number, nobody protests; but if I abbreviate it as N, it will be reported that "at this point the lecturer deviated into higher mathematics". Disregarding such prejudices, we must recognize that the allocation of symbols A, B, C, . . . to various entities or qualities is merely an abbreviated nomenclature which involves no mathematical conceptions.

The next step is to introduce some kind of relation or comparison between A and B. If we examine the mental process of comparing two objects, I think we shall catch ourselves imagining a series of objects intermediate between them. We can best realize how they differ by considering what we should have to do to change one continuously into the other. If the idea of gradually modifying one into the other is too far-fetched, we simply decide that the two objects are so utterly unlike that a comparison would be meaningless. It will therefore be useful to introduce the conception of an operation which changes one object or quality into another. For example, the conception of an operation of expansion is useful when we have to compare objects of different size. Accordingly alongside our original A, B, C, . . . , we have a new set of symbols P, Q, R, . . . , standing for the operations that change A into B and A into C, B into C, etc.

But we are still in the stage of nomenclature, and mathematics seems as far off as ever. To continue, we must try to compare the operations P, Q, R, . . . with one another. Accordingly to our former conclusion this leads us to imagine an operation of changing the operation P into the operation Q. Thus we have a new set of operations (or hyper-operations) X, Y, Z, . . , which change P into Q, P into R, Q into R, . . . And so we go in an orgy of notation, introducing more and more symbols, but never getting beyond notation.

It is easy to introduce mathematical notation; the difficulty is to turn it to useful account;

“Let x denote beauty,-y, manners well-bred,-
“z, Fortune,-(this last is essential),-
“Let L stand for love”-our philosopher said,-
“Then L is a function of x, y, and z,
“Of the kind which is known as potential.”

“Now integrate L with respect to d t,
“(t Standing for time and persuasion);
“Then, between proper limits, ’tis easy to see,
“The definite integral Marriage must be:-
“(A very concise demonstration).” [ Prof. W.J.M Rankine, Songs and Fables]

At the start there is no essential difference between this example of mathematical notation, and the A, B, C, . . . , P, Q, R, . . . . , X, Y, Z, . . ., that we have been discussing. We must find what it is that turns the latter into a powerful calculus for scientific purposes, whereas the former has no practical outcomes - as the poem goes on to relate. 

 

My suspicion is that what Eddington and Rankine mocked in the absurd over extension of mathematical thinking where it had no business going is exactly what has been done in the so-called social sciences from the start and even more so as they cover up their inadequate methodology with equations and numbers and claims about them, and also Darwinian speculation about the past, making up not love stories but of stories of nature red in tooth and claw (it all started and continued in economic lore), and now, as their abilities to do adequate observation of the physical objects they want to discover will never catch up to their ambitions, physicists and cosmologists. We've already gotten to the point where the least speculative branches of those, what particle physicists do, are demanding that an even bigger, groovier, particle accelerator be built for them with no even theoretical justification for doing so in plausibly observable science to back it up, but for them to impose imaginary universes on human notions of reality without any possibility of doing that in any conceivable future.  If Sabine Hossenfelder is worried about scientists who cheat (listen to the last link) I'm not hesitant to point out that they've been doing it increasingly from the start.  I think a lot of the public distrust of science, their refusal to accept science they don't like and the successful manipulation of that by fascist politicians like Jim Jordan - for the love of Mike - scientists overselling and lying about what they do, allowing frauds to go by the name of science certainly has a role in that.

I'll give more of this chapter from Eddington's book over the next little while, though I'm not sure how to handle the mathematical notation on blogger, I might have to learn something along the way.  Which might be fun.