The House of David

"all your cities lie in dust"

Saturday, November 21, 2009

Meta


On 8 November, from the Great 16-18 October Hangover, I posted that Intelligent-Design was a metaphysic, and that it can't be taught as science. I did offer this paragraph, which I did not answer properly:

But why not? Shut up, the scientist explains; this isn't the class for that. So where is the class for that? Where do we go to learn metaphysics?

I think we're ready to answer that. Let's look at mathematics first.

Every branch of math has starting axioms, which have to be assumed, or else nothing can get done. Euclid set out his geometry with a famous five axioms (or, I should say in Greek, axiomata). From them, we can do geometry in "flat" space; without them, we can't. We never could prove those axioms, but we were able to devise other geometries; which meant a restriction of "Euclidean space" to that geometry which followed his Rules. It then was found that around gravitational fields the non-Euclidean geometry works better.

We've been dealing with a branch of math dubbed "Meta-Mathematics" around here for the last couple months. Meta-Math is the process of doing math - how to get the answer faster (log tables), whether certain algorithms are practical to do (NP-hard), whether a given field can ever be "fished out" (Gödel Incompleteness), and such. Meta-math has its own uses, for instance as the basis of computer science.

No-one argues much about whether meta-math invalidates the process of math. But in some cases, it somewhat does. The Traveling Squirrel won't get his minimum route in polynomial time (unless P=NP, which humans must pray isn't true). Some problems will NEVER be solved; except by introducing a new branch of math, which is what happened to Euclid's geometry.

It took thousands of years for mathematicians to give up proving Euclid and instead to come up with a "meta-geometry". Until that was formally defined, it wasn't suitable for young geometricians to hear that Euclidean geometry didn't work - because it does work for the applications they were going to put it to.

Physics has a meta-physic: inductive and deductive reasoning, and the a priori setting of The Rules to ban all extranatural reasons for the problem on your plate. By extension, so do all the physical sciences, including biology. This meta-physic happens to work for all modern science, including biology.

People who propose Intelligent Design are, in effect, asking for a meta-biology which won't be subject to gene expression and natural selection. This is something they cannot do, until they have a more formal (in the mathematical sense) textbook than Genesis and the Qur'an.

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posted by Zimri on 20:17 | link |

Thursday, November 12, 2009

Not crying


It's been a month and a day since I restarted this blog, and some observers may be thinking that "cry for help" has become a theme. I invoked it for The Cão. Then I supported Sullivan's invocation for Nidal Hasan. I could be on someone's shortlist for an intervention.

It's okay, really.

Today was a good day. I had free food, or nearly, all day. Work went well. Went to the Houston Dot Net User Group this evening and learnt a few things. They held a raffle, in which I won a 1 TB external hard drive (yes, that's T for Tera).

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posted by Zimri on 22:01 | link |

Friday, November 06, 2009

On changing templates


Andrea Harris at Spleenville just changed her site location. I had to go fix my template.

I'm not picking on her. Web personalities have the right to change domains. In my case I'm overdue for creating a domain. I'm picking on the process.

Fixing the template isn't so hard. What annoys me is having to go through my sidebar links to see if everyone is still where they were; and then, waiting however long FTP is pleased to make me wait to post the new template to the site. What's most annoying is going to someone else's site and finding that most of its links are dead, or that the bloggers linked from that someone had given up or gone barking mad since we last looked.

Maybe there could be a central blogger registry, where bloggers can put their current location. For us consumers of the registry, I would still have control over presentation (I like the mouseover events, myself). But the URL, and other useful information like "last updated", would be controlled by the registry.

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posted by Zimri on 19:41 | link |

Monday, November 02, 2009

The deadliest sin for a blogger is sloth


I got lazy last weekend. The laziness didn't start on Sunday; it started on Saturday. The two posts I did then, I had started on Friday. On Sunday I had nothing to do. One could put that down to a desire not to work on the Sabbath. But I'm not that hardcore of a Christian. And if I were, I'd prefer the Sabbath be observed when Jesus observed it - Saturday. This quietitude had no excuse; it was sloth.

Because I'm always up for adding to my list of shortcomings, I'll go with hypocrisy with this post.

I went hunting around for other secular Right blogs. I found the SecularConservative in Houston; and The Conservative Humanist Association, and (although this title's a mite more strident) The Atheist Conservative.

I can't put any of them in the sidebar. Janus at SecularConservative seems to be burning out. ConservativeHumanist hasn't been posting regular updates either. The Atheist Conservative does little but paste others' content lately. If they don't much like their own blogs, how far can a visitor like those blogs?

I don't think this says anything about secularists or the Right. There are also a-plenty of lazy religious believers; and it's not as if the Left quite gets its base of support from the Hardworking-American Community, either.

People just get into slumps where there is nothing to say.

For awhile I had a LOT to say, that I'd been sitting on for two and a half years, some of which I was NOT ALLOWED to say (and it wasn't just that one external force). I don't know that I've said it all, yet.

I'll let you know.

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posted by Zimri on 16:30 | link |

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Too much stuff


When the blog gets over 1000 posts and a span of seven years... it gets harder to tell if I've posted about an issue before.

I'd thought I'd dealt with gay marriage and apparently, I hadn't. At least not in an existential way. I had to use the search feature of Blogger to find that out.

And I'm not even particularly prolific. I have huge gaps in the record. We've just returned from one that lasted, what, two and a half years?

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posted by Zimri on 00:26 | link |

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Overheating


I've been battling bit of writer's block lately. Today the gates opened a bit more. But, just my luck, it is too hot here (Gulf Coast) for me to handle a full essay. My brain functions poorly when the temperature runs above about 80 F.

There are other essays I started to write late last Friday but they require research, and THAT requires that my brain works. Of the posts today, two were adapted from comments I left elsewhere when it was cooler; and two others were barely more than link-dumps. I kept all of it to subjects I could handle in short, controlled bursts.

Alastair Reynolds in Redemption Ark, part of a saga I've been remiss in not reading until now, has a character named Skade. Skade has no hair, but her parents genetically engineered a fleshy crest upon her head. The crest distributes heat from her head, much as the Dimetrodon during the Permian had a crest to distribute heat from its spinal cord.

Times like now, I'm envious...

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posted by Zimri on 18:36 | link |

Monday, October 12, 2009

This blog's political standpoint


This is a pro-conservative blog, written by a non-conservative observer.


Conservatives and this current form of government are diametrically opposed. John Derbyshire is now insisting that Conservatism as a governing philosophy is doomed. Mencius Moldbug thinks that the whole of democracy is doomed, and that only a Reaction can work. I have accepted their premise up to the point that there is a crisis.


Moldbug wants instead some form of autocracy, like the Chinese or Roman Empires. I don't like the track record of autocrats in the long term; they get corrupt. I don't think human nature will change if, when, or because Moldbug's best marijuana contact has been promoted to Emperor Norton II of New America.


My diagnosis of the problem comes from what I have observed of Liberals and Conservatives. Liberals are transnational. Conservatives are local. The sin of Liberals is pride. The sin of Conservatives is sloth (which I keep running into in the form of intellectual sloth, or stupidity). I don't want Liberals running the public fisc. I don't want Conservatives deciding on scientific standards.


But if I say "to hell with both", as I have a propensity to do, then the available population dwindles to a few dozen thousand other Asperger's cases, and you can't build a community on that. Plus there's the problem of what to do with the billions of corpses from all the Liberals and Conservatives that I just killed. And I'll miss some of them.


So I don't want an autocracy and I don't want Stephen King to cook up his superflu. But I don't think leaving well enough alone will work; the likely end point will be anarchy, or fascism.


To stave off the crisis, I want to push Liberals into transnational institutions and to keep them out of local governance; and I want to pen Conservatives out of decisions which involve science.


If this is done, in my opinion, there will be no need for a full Reaction or the other, worse options.

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posted by Zimri on 22:46 | link |

Sunday, October 11, 2009

Post 1000


Hah. I was at #994 when I took down the old blog...


I had threatened to fill up the remnant with "six posts of naked gymnastics". Aren't you glad I decided to post this other stuff instead?

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posted by Zimri on 19:33 | link |

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