vol VII: Notes

2016

Notes

Sunday 11 September 2016 - Saturday 17 September 2016

[Notebook: DB 80: Cosmic plumbing]

Sunday 11 September 2016

[page 226]

Monday 12 September 2016

Chapter 2: Language. Make myself do it. Rational control of feeling. I don't feel like it, but it must be done or . . . (something bad will happen, something good will not happen). Reason increases [in an abstract linguistic way] our radius of knowledge / action beyond the instinctual. Climate action / denial may fit this notion. From an instinctual point of view our traffic with the world / god is one way. God dictates, we obey., and it is difficult to accept that our activities are changing the world which has been practically unchanged for hundreds [??] of generations, even though we know that it is slowly changing due to slow processes like continental drift, growing mountains, changing ocean currents and weather and so on. In the divine universe the interaction with god is conversational and we must use our reason to broaden our outlook until it is equivalent to the outlook of the world.

Many people have thought over recent centuries that we have to suppress our natural instincts in order to establish civilization, and much educational theory and practice has been devoted to this end. In my case it was devoted to suppressing sensuality by defining it as sinful and the general tendency on monasticism is to suppress the needs and desires of 'the body' in in the hope of developing 'the spirit' and

[page 227]

achieving closer union with god thereby. Freud, Civilization . . . Sigmund Freud, Anthony the Great - Wikipedia

Bayoumi: The US reaction to 9/11 is precisely what is to be expected from the ancient (conservative, right wing) mind set: an eye for an eye, or even a thousand or a million eyes for an eye to show that nobody can mess with us. Jesus of Nazareth preached the opposite, but love has a hard battle against hatred. Mustafa Bayoumi

Scientific theology studies the transition from Old Testament Hatred and new testament love, and provides a physical model for the forces involved in this transformation [which is typical of the evolutionary complexification of the world].

Parvus error in principio . . . deals only with ballistic systems. Evidence based (ie guided) systems can continually correct for errors if they know where they want to go [and where they are]. Thomas de Aquino

Diane von Furstenberg: 'have a business plan' Hayley Phelan

Taub: Extra judicial killing. Amanda Taub

Is the vagueness of oncoming age making it easier to see the big picture?

Politicians are influence peddlars: donate to me to get me elected and I will look after you.

Colleen Lewis: 'In a well functioning democracy the pubic interest must always take precedence over personal and party interests. Colleen Lewis

We must take sexuality from the devil and give it to god.

Tuesday 13 September 2016

At a dead end so go to work.

Wednesday 14 September 2016

'Writer's block' like 'insight block' is simply a processing delay while the neural network finds a halt or conclusion that can be revealed to consciousness, that is to speak the mental world, unsaid here because there is no one else here. This output is a message which may influence the processes in other minds.

Mind we take to be a dynamic system comprising all the processes executed by that system [a closed system is one that communicates only with itself, open system also looks out].

Philosophers have long disparaged the concrete world, perhaps because they lacked a concept like the transfinite network that can embrace is all.

[page 229]

Brooks: Avalanche of Distrust David Brooks

Distrust arises when there is insufficient content in the 'tacit dimension' underlying the communication. So I have recently concluded a conversation on the internet with a woman who initially seemed quite attractive but ultimately asked for help with a financial operation of some sort, a confidence trickster in other words. One obvious clue in hindsight is that 'her' letters showed little evidence that she had read my letters and the replies tended to be rather energetic and gushing romance with attractive photographs. Polanyi: The Tacit Dimension

God is the tacit dimension, hence the role of theology. At present theology is fragmented rubbish immortalizing ancient warlords and providing no realistic foundation for unity and communication.

God is love and love is the fundamental tacit dimension somehow physically embodied in the general theory of relativity which springs from an action principle that can operate in any number of dimensions but natural selection has chosen 4 as selected by the 'wire crossing' theorem.

The probabilities of eigenvalues are related to the processing times of the corresponding eigenfunctions. This idea may break the logjam with how to reconcile the computer model with the overlap model. Computation time is a function of energy, momentum,

[page 230]

(processing frequency and memory) and the difficulty of the problem.

Thursday 15 September

Book remains a bit confused but I am gradually getting all the pieces into the box and have little bits assembled. Learning to follow my network model really, identifying all the messages (strings) I want to put in it and moving from there to the sources of the strings which is assumed to be god / gravitation / the initial singularity. Then we can talk about navigation along the generalized geodesic under the influence of the surrounding potentials. The general theory explains how gravitation guides inertial frames along their geodesics. In effect I am trying to put differential geometry into words, a mapping. We can understand the generalized geodesic by making a network model in which the differentials of differential geometry are computable transformations which conserve energy [and action and momentum].

A differential can transmit a content free message, ie a string of empty actions. We aim to replace this with any computable transformation, building on the null transform of gravitation. Every point in the differential manifold becomes a process with a network address analogous to a gaussian coordinate.

Gravitation is the null language. The large scale structure of the universe is the output of an energy network, ie sequences of messages without context and so without meaning.

[page 231]

The first half hour is the most productive, seeing the conclusions reaches in my sleep. A dream of a relationship on very fast forward. The child seemed to be walking only days after it was born.

First noted generalized geodesic in Misner about 1975, ie 40 years cooking away in there. Now if only I can pull it off. Misner, Thorne & Wheeler: Gravitation

Friedman: The Trump 'post-truth' campaign is simply a consequence of the general post-truth nature of all our major theologies and religion and points to a serious need for new theology: an incentive to keep going on an exploration of new theological space.

Act: do something

The overlap algorithm (Born Rule) indicates that quantum mechanics deals with null messages whose overlaps contain no marks and are therefore linear. But what about P = |φ|²?

The goal of manufacturing is to make something that works. I have been building a toilet and a shower room all week with to aims in mind, to make it all work, and to make it look good with a bit of tiling and chrome, because looking good seems to be just as important as being good, ie true rather than deceptive signalling. Doing things properly is not always easy and short cuts beckon, but we owe it to the materials to use them in a way that gives a building a good life 50 —> 100 years, tending toward optimal structures designed for thousand year lifetimes.

You've got to be as bad as the baddest to control them.

[page 232]

As a child I was often excited by something that I might make if only I had the tools and the skills. I had a shed full of tools which I shared with my father, but could not quite realize what I imagined. I was impressed by a series of articles in the Boys Own Paper about how to build a steam engine, soldering the boiler, machining the parts and fitting them. Did anyone ever complete this project [presumably the author did]? Not me. It was beyond me even to start. I am still in the same frame of mind. What I want to reveal is the way the world creates itself as a guide to the way we can create ourselves, which task really seems to require controlling the large scale criminal elements in the world whose power is great enough to subvert good government.

What we really need to excite is a global rethink of our position in the world, a new theory of everything, that is a new theology.

A few years to get the message perfect and then propagate? It has taken about 50 years so far so that sounds optimistic, but from little things big things grow. Do we want a big thing?

Yes, a global tacit dimension, ie invisible software, ie god [from science fiction (hypothesis) to science fact].

Friday 16 September 2016

The media in their role as error correcting negative feedback can be depressing reading. The socially minded engineers of this world would prefer to avoid all bad events, those that cause death, injury, pain and other forms of loss. Many failures are caused by corruption in the chain of quality control. Slezak Michael Slezak

Now I am happy again. Maybe its the coffee.

What would be ideal would be for a theological essay on the idea that God is love to be so clear and compact (a definite and separate idea) that it went viral in the (human) noosphere, thus changing our attitude to good and evil, love and hate etc as controllable dualities within the overall context of divinity. This is how enormously complex systems like me come out of the primordial chaos, ie the state in which all events / actions are equiprobable because they have no distinguishing form [existence without essence]. It all comes down to the power of reproduction [which can break the equiprobability] which comes down to the power of computation, ie the power to construct a new relatively pristine copy of an abstract form, concretely embodied in 'blueprints', DNA etc. So we want a new theology that can breed, ie a source of creation which we might call simple love, unspecified, like the simple god. It is the unspecification of underdetermination which is the source of creativity = variation from which the environment selects. The environment selects the survivors to join it, to become part of the environment for others [bit like the election of the Pope, where the reigning Pope selects Electors to elect his successor]. Hallett; Cantorian Set Theory and Limitation of Size

[page 234]

To send a message is to shape some energy into a sequence of symbols which represents the meaning of the message in the context of the sources at each end of the message.

Once we have named all the points in a line with numbers we can treat each one as an identical but identified symbol, and imagine all possible permutations of points in a line or string, moving us out of metric (cardinal) space to ordinal space, where the symbols are important for their identity, not metric contribution.

Saturday 17 September 2016

Slowly boiling down to god is love. This was the theme of the only practise sermon I preached in the Order of Preachers, probably under the influence of lust for my fellow brethren. Somewhat unrequited lust has been the force driving me toward the concrete God. The transfinite network gives me a tool [large enough to represent the fixed points in the divine dynamics].

The defining terms of intimacy; surface tension, wetting and repelling: membrane structure - the soap bubble. Union and separation. Empedocles love and strife vs contact and non-contact, inside / outside light cone, temporal / spatial separation. Wetting - Wikipedia, Gordon Campbell: Empedocles

Saturday off all to myself; remain dry all day on the outside, wet on the inside as usual. Wake in the middle of the night with the radiation induced dry mouth but avoided getting up for a drink by consciously salivating.

[page 235]

Francis: How I wish all religious confession would say that killing in the name of God is satanic.' Mickens Robert Mickens

Rodden and Rossi: 'Moreover [Orwell] was honest enough to admit that the decay of religion in the modern world had left a spiritual void, one that was filled by totalitarian ideologies like Nazism and Communism.' John Rodden and John P. Rossi

The notion of an omniscient and omnipotent God is essentially totalitarian. Not a sparrow . . . Mt 10:29 Matthew 10:29

The transfinite network can happily track (represent) every quantum of action in the universe. Each is an image of the divine symmetry.

McNair: A universal theology is the answer to the democratic paradox, since it puts us all 'on the same page'. Brian McNair

Points are by definition identical, but in a line they have order and so can be named by reference to their neighbours. Order establishes a frame of reference that gives identity to identical points. Cantor-Dedekind axiom - Wikipedia

We consider symbols to be dynamical and represent them by the outputs of their internal computers. Permutations of symbols are then equivalent to changing the order of the instructions in a piece of software which may mostly lead to crashes but occasionally to something that can reproduce itself, so gaining a bigger share of the available resources.

[page 236]

I am off in formalist fairyland, free of all the tiresome realities of operation in the real world (like tiling bathrooms, a capital work designed to enhance cleanliness and appearance). To bring a trade approach to writing.

Formally we can create a dictionary of correspondences between real numbers and points in the real line. This correspondence cannot be created on a spacelike slice in reality because there are not enough symbols to go round. It can be approached dynamically, however by changing the permutations of the ℵ₀ turing machines to create each of the real numbers in turn. So we imagine the generalized geodesic of the universe as a 'line' of such permutations, a temporal sequence.

As I imagine new expressions of the creative idea it begins to seem more normal.

What do I want to do this intant? Read? Write? Eat? Obviously write about this momentary fork in my noetic geodesic.

Every quantum of action is a copy od the personality of god, so we think of the 'transfinite trinity' or the transfinity.

An act is one revolution [of phase] whose form or essence is a function of the dimensions of the space on which the act occurs [always ultimately Hilbert space].

[page 237]

Writing is a waiting game, waiting for the formulations to pop into consciousness. Usually come as isolated sentences (as recorded in this log) whose connection to one another is not immediately obvious, which it is why it is difficult to fit them together into a book. On the other hand, since they are emerging from a consciousness soaked on theology for nearly 70 years, we imagine that there is an invisible connection which will eventually come to light.

Leadership: formulating, propagating and executing a plan.

Sunday 18 September 2016

Yeats on writing: 'Do not hurry, do not rest' [or maybe Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Goodreads)]. Tracy Chevalier

What does God expect of me? Depends on who you ask. The Catholic Church told me it wanted me to be a priest and propagate it to the whole world. The divine universe provides a much more complere set of instructions, moment to moment, to deal with all the events that arise in my environment, both external and in my own consciousness, like pain, falling in love or speculating about what I should do to meet the divine expectation: basically avoid death, grow and reproduce, or maybe just be.

All writing, all messages are software insofar as they are capable of changing the state of hardware / wetware.

Secrecy and diplomacy: Kornbluh Peter Kornbluh

[page 238]

Let us guess that the fundamental physical observable is the local passage of time which we observe as a sequence of events like the sequence of actions I have executed since I got up this morning, I remember some of these actions is a abstract form, but their reality no longer exists except in the imprint of their occurrence on future state, eg now and for some time I have got my socks on. There is also this trail of writing that does back to the entry 'SUNDAY'.

The beauty of mathematics is that it is all the data there on the paper, there is no need to look at the outside world except for inspiration and normal non-mathematical purposes. Theology is similar insofar as my version of the theory of everything is extrapolated from my own history of experiences = string, web of experiences.

A computer is a network. Pavlovic and Meadows Dusko Pavlovic and Catherine Meadows: Actor-network procedures

Reflections on writing can be extended to reflections on all events , the expression of a symbol like this word of one of the many raindrops falling on the roof at the moment, each of which has a source in the cloudy sky and comes into being through a network of thermodynamic / statistical forces. Rain - Wikipedia

What shapes the statistics? The underlying process. so the statistics of road fatalities are a product of the interactions of drivers, vehicles and roads. We can influence these statistics by influencing the 'potentials' that influence events on the road [eg seat belts, ABS, drugs].

[page 239]

Potential = capital.

Art, creating symbols of meaning and pleasure.

Now that I am 'retiring' [from trade], my transformation is from manipulating the physical world to manipulating the human mental world, the noosphere. Here I am trying to introduce new ideas. I long for something like the special theory of relativity which is immediately obvious and spread like wildfire due to its clarity and obviousness [did it really?]. Criticism of the theory of relativity - Wikipedia

So my scheme goes

1. The universe is divine
2. We reconcile old a new ideas of god using fixed point theory
3. We explain the relationships between the fixed points using the transfinite computer network.
4. We use the network to explain physics [the universe is built in God]
5. We apply it to the evolution of ourselves and our culture
6. We use it to predict / control our future.

Trust, faith and consistency. Christianity makes little sense to the modern mind. Its whole meaning now lies in its being a historical antecedent of enlightenment.

Education was once primarily political, bringing up the young of the ruling class to themselves join the ruling class, maintaining their hegemony and disproportionate share of resources. The ruling class exists in an ungrounded fiction of entitlement. We are all entitled to a fair share of what is available. This is the maximum entropy and maximum stability state.

Copyright:

You may copy this material freely provided only that you quote fairly and provide a link (or reference) to your source.

Further reading

Books

Click on the "Amazon" link below each book entry to see details of a book (and possibly buy it!)

Freud, Sigmund, Civilization and its Discontents, Wilder Publications 2010 'Newly designed in a uniform format, each new paperback in the Standard Edition [of Freud] opens with a biographical essay on Freud's life and work—along with a note on the individual volume (Peter Gay, Sterling Professor of History at Yale )   Amazon   back

Hallett , Michael, Cantorian set theory and limitation of size, Oxford UP 1984 Jacket: 'This book will be of use to a wide audience, from beginning students of set theory (who can gain from it a sense of how the subject reached its present form), to mathematical set theorists (who will find an expert guide to the early literature), and for anyone concerned with the philosophy of mathematics (who will be interested by the extensive and perceptive discussion of the set concept).' Daniel Isaacson.  Amazon   back

Misner, Charles W, and Kip S Thorne, John Archibald Wheeler, Gravitation, Freeman 1973 Jacket: 'Einstein's description of gravitation as curvature of spacetime led directly to that greatest of all predictions of his theory, that the universe itself is dynamic. Physics still has far to go to come to terms with this amazing fact and what it means for man and his relation to the universe. John Archibald Wheeler. . . . this is a book on Einstein's theory of gravity. . . . '  Amazon   back

Park, David Allen, Introduction to the Quantum Theory, McGraw-Hill Book Company 1992   Amazon   back

Polanyi, Michael, and Amaryta Sen (foreword), The Tacit Dimension, University Of Chicago Press 2009 Amazon product description: '“I shall reconsider human knowledge by starting from the fact that we can know more than we can tell,” writes Michael Polanyi, whose work paved the way for the likes of Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper. The Tacit Dimension argues that tacit knowledge—tradition, inherited practices, implied values, and prejudgments—is a crucial part of scientific knowledge. Back in print for a new generation of students and scholars, this volume challenges the assumption that skepticism, rather than established belief, lies at the heart of scientific discovery.'  Amazon   back

Links

Adam Taylor, Is environmental destruction a crime against humanity. The ICC may be about to find out, 'Global Diligence, an international criminal law firm that lodged a case with the court accusing Cambodia's ruling elite of land grabs that saw as many as 350,000 people evicted, was among those welcoming the news. "The systemic crimes committed under the guise of ‘development’ are no less damaging to victims than many wartime atrocities," Richard Rogers, a partner in the firm, said in a statement. "The ICC Prosecutor has sent a clear message that such offences may amount to crimes against humanity and can no longer be tolerated.” ' back

Alex Reilly, Australia is in danger of being swamped by Muslims. The numbers tll a different story, 'According to the 2011 census, Muslims make up just 2.2% of the Australian population. The Australian Bureau of Statistics, which runs the Census, says the 2011 Census data show that:. . . The most common non-Christian religions in 2011 were Buddhism (accounting for 2.5% of the population), Islam (2.2%) and Hinduism (1.3%). Of these, Hinduism had experienced the fastest growth since 2006.' back

Amanda Taub, How Countries Like the Philippines Fall Into Vigilante Violence, 'But social scientists who study extrajudicial killings say the real story is more complicated, and more tragic. It is often the affected communities themselves that unwittingly help create the circumstances for this violence. It tends to begin, the research suggests, with a weak state and a population desperate for security. Short-term incentives push everyone to bad decisions that culminate in violence that, once it has reached a level as bloody as that in the Philippines, can be nearly impossible to stop.' back

Andrew Higgins, In Expanding Russiab Influence, Faith Combines With Firepower, 'While tanks and artillery have been Russia’s weapons of choice to project its power into neighboring Ukraine and Georgia, Mr. Putin has also mobilized faith to expand the country’s reach and influence. A fervent foe of homosexuality and any attempt to put individual rights above those of family, community or nation, the Russian Orthodox Church helps project Russia as the natural ally of all those who pine for a more secure, illiberal world free from the tradition-crushing rush of globalization, multiculturalism and women’s and gay rights.' back

Andrew Hopkins, Drilling in the Bight: has BP learnt the right lessons from its Gulf of Mexico blowout?, 'BP claims to have learnt the lessons from the Gulf of Mexico incident, and to have incorporated them in its drilling plan for the Bight (as outlined in section 6 of its environmental overview). However, the lessons it refers to are drawn from its own report on the accident, which dealt primarily with technical issues rather than the underpinning organisational factors. Other major reports and commentary have identified a range of organisational failures that contributed to the blowout. BP has not shown that it has learnt these bigger lessons.' back

Anthony the Great - Wikipedia, Anthony the Great - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Saint Anthony . . . was a Christian monk from Egypt, revered since his death as a saint. He is distinguished from other saints named Anthony by various epithets: Anthony the Great, Anthony of Egypt, Anthony the Abbot, Anthony of the Desert, Anthony the Anchorite, and Anthony of Thebes. For his importance among the Desert Fathers and to all later Christian monasticism, he is also known as the Father of All Monks.' back

Aquinas 608, Summa II I, 3, 8: Whether man's happiness consists in the vision of the divine essence, 'I answer that, Final and perfect happiness can consist in nothing else than the vision of the Divine Essence. To make this clear, two points must be observed. First, that man is not perfectly happy, so long as something remains for him to desire and seek: ... If therefore the human intellect, knowing the essence of some created effect, knows no more of God than "that He is"; the perfection of that intellect does not yet reach simply the First Cause, but there remains in it the natural desire to seek the cause. Wherefore it is not yet perfectly happy. Consequently, for perfect happiness the intellect needs to reach the very Essence of the First Cause. And thus it will have its perfection through union with God as with that object, in which alone man's happiness consists, as stated above (this question articles 1, 7; q 2, a 8). back

Beatrix Campbell, the scale of sexual abuse in the UK is a catastrophe. We need catharsis, 'There are millions of us – survivors and professionals and their advocates – waiting, waiting, waiting for recognition and respect and the opportunity to participate in a cultural revolution. Goddard has suggested there should be a complete review of the inquiry she has quit, “with a view to remodelling it and recalibrating its emphasis more towards current events and thus focusing major attention on the present and future protection of children”. But to abandon the excavation of the past because it is too big and too hard – as Goddard seems to suggest – is to demand that we commit collective amnesia. It would mean “giving up on a better past” – in Herman’s phrase – for the millions who will suffer in the future.' back

Ben Brantley, Edward Albee: A Playwright Who Saw the Minotaur Inside All of Us, back

Beyonce, Feeling Myself, back

Brian McNair, The democratic paradox, 'But something else is becoming evermore visible, which I will call the democratic paradox. A book of that name published in 2000 by Belgian political theorist Chantal Mouffe observed: On one side we have the liberal tradition constituted by the rule of law, the defence of human rights and the respect of individual liberty; on the other the democratic tradition whose main ideas are those of equality, identity between governing and governed and popular sovereignty. There is no necessary relation between those two distinct traditions but only a contingent historical articulation.' back

Cantor-Dedekind axiom - Wikipedia, Cantor-Dedekind axiom - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'In mathematical logic, the phrase Cantor–Dedekind axiom has been used to describe the thesis that the real numbers are order-isomorphic to the linear continuum of geometry. In other words, the axiom states that there is a one to one correspondence between real numbers and points on a line. This axiom is the cornerstone of analytic geometry. The Cartesian coordinate system developed by René Descartes implicitly assumes this axiom by blending the distinct concepts of real number system with the geometric line or plane into a conceptual metaphor.' back

Colleen Lewis, When political self-interest decides donation rules, what chance reform in the public interest?, 'If the issues raised here signify the best Australia’s federal politicians can do to reform political donations, the public interest is in peril. The electorate and media need to maintain pressure for meaningful reform, and every reform politicians put forward needs to be motivated solely by the desire to enhance the public interest. In any well-functioning democracy, the public interest must always take precedence over personal and party interests.' back

Criticism of the theory of relativity - Wikipedia, Criticism of the theory of relativity - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Criticism of the theory of relativity of Albert Einstein was mainly expressed in the early years after its publication in the early twentieth century, on scientific, pseudoscientific, philosophical, or ideological bases.Though some of these criticisms had the support of reputable scientists, Einstein's theory of relativity is now accepted by the scientific community. Reasons for criticism of the theory of relativity have included alternative theories, rejection of the abstract-mathematical method, and alleged errors of the theory. . . . There are still some critics of relativity today, but their opinions are not shared by the majority in the scientific community.' back

David Brooks, The Avalanche of Distrust, 'I’m beginning to think this whole sordid campaign is being blown along by an acrid gust of distrust. The two main candidates, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, are remarkably distrustful. They have set the modern standards for withholding information — his not releasing tax and health records, her not holding regular news conferences or quickly disclosing her pneumonia diagnosis. Both have a problem with spontaneous, reciprocal communication with a hint of vulnerability.' back

Dusko Pavlovic and Catherine Meadows, Actor-network procedures: Modelling multi-factorial authentication, device pairing, social interactions, 'Abstract. As computation spreads from computers to networks of compute rs, and migrates into cyberspace, it ceases to be globally programmable, but it remains programmable ind irectly and partially: network com- putations cannot be controlled, but they can be steered by imposin g local constraints on network nodes. The tasks of ”programming” global behaviors through local const raints belong to the area of security . The “program particles” that assure that a system of local interactio ns leads towards some desired global goals are called security protocols . They are the software connectors of modern, world wide softwa re systems. As computation spreads beyond cyberspace, into physical and so cial spaces, new security tasks and prob- lems arise. As computer networks are extended by nodes with phys ical sensors and controllers, including the humans, and interlaced with social networks, the engineering conc epts and techniques of computer security blend with the social processes of security, that evolved since the dawn of mankind. These new connectors for computational and social software require a new “discipline of p rogramming” of global behaviors through local constraints. Since the new discipline seems to be emerging from a combination of established models of security protocols with older methods of procedural programm ing, we use the name procedures for these new connectors, that generalize protocols. In the present paper we propose actor-networks as a formal model of computation in heterogenous net- works of computers, humans and their devices, where these new p rocedures run; and we introduce Procedure Derivation Logic (PDL) as a framework for reasoning about security in actor-netw orks. On the way, we survey the guiding ideas of Protocol Derivation Logic (also PDL) that evolved through our work in security in last 10 years. Both formalisms are geared towards graphic reaso ning and, ultimately, tool support. We illustrate their workings by analysing a popular form of two-factor a uthentication, and a multi-channel device pairing procedure, devised for this occasion.' back

E. J. Dionne Jr, Moral equivalence and Donald Trump, 'Donald Trump’s suggestion that the former KGB agent who presides over a corrupt and authoritarian regime in Russia is a better leader than the president of the United States ought to invite far more Republican condemnation than it has received. Trump’s apologia for Vladimir Putin is morally and philosophically ghastly.' back

E.J. Dionne Jr, Obama asks the right question on Trump: 'Huh?', 'Even Donald Trump is capable of posing interesting questions, and he asked one of this election’s most important when he declared: “What the hell do you have to lose?” He was specifically addressing his query to African Americans, but it’s something all Americans should think about. And the latest report on incomes released Tuesday by the Census Bureau suggests that the vast majority of Americans, including African Americans, have a great deal to lose if the progress the country has made since we began our recovery from the Great Recession is endangered by a candidate whose policies are, depending on the day, quite radical, entirely unpredictable or simply incoherent.' back

Emily Borrow, How Two Producers of 'Transparent' Made Their Own Lives More Visible, 'They are both 33 and around the same height, but Ernst appears slighter. Wearing light brown pants, bright white Reeboks and a diamond stud in his right ear, he explained that he and Drucker have backgrounds in “auto-­ethnography,” which he defined as “the practice of creating self-­reflexive work, or work that reflected my community.” This, he said, was a guiding impulse for the photographs in “Relationship.” ' back

Game - Wikipedia, Game - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'A game is structured playing, usually undertaken for enjoyment and sometimes used as an educational tool. Games are distinct from work, which is usually carried out for remuneration, and from art, which is more often an expression of aesthetic or ideological elements. . . . Key components of games are goals, rules, challenge, and interaction. Games generally involve mental or physical stimulation, and often both. Many games help develop practical skills, serve as a form of exercise, or otherwise perform an educational, simulational, or psychological role.' back

Gordon Campbell, Empedocles (c. 492—432 B.C.E.) (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy), 'Empedocles (of Acagras in Sicily) was a philosopher and poet: one of the most important of the philosophers working before Socrates (the Presocratics), and a poet of outstanding ability and of great influence upon later poets such as Lucretius. His works On Nature and Purifications . . . exist in more than 150 fragments. He has been regarded variously as a materialist physicist, a shamanic magician, a mystical theologian, a healer, a democratic politician, a living god, and a fraud.' back

Hayley Phelan, Please Enjoy Some DGAF Business, Style and Sex Advice From Diane von Furstenberg, '"People always ask me, If you met the girl that you were then what would you tell her? I was always so irritated when people asked me that because, I really didn't know what to say because I would probably do the same thing because I'm the same person. But now I have an answer, and it only hit me a few months ago: have a business plan." ' back

Civilization and Its Discontents - Wikipedia, Civilization and Its Discontents - Wikipedia, the fre encyclopedia, Civilization and Its Discontents is a book by Sigmund Freud. Written in 1929, and first published in German in 1930 as Das Unbehagen in der Kultur ("The Uneasiness in Civilization"). It is considered one of Freud's most important and widely read works. . . In this seminal book, Sigmund Freud enumerates what he sees as the fundamental tensions between civilization and the individual. The primary friction, he asserts, stems from the individual's quest for instinctive freedom and civilization's contrary demand for conformity and repression of instincts.' back

James E.M. Watson et al, Catastrophic Declines in Wilderness Areas Undermine Global Environment Targets, 'Watson et al. discover that the Earth’s wilderness areas are disappearing at a rate that has significantly outpaced their protection over the past two decades. Despite their ecological, climatological, and cultural importance, wilderness areas are ignored in multilateral environmental agreements, highlighting the need for urgent global policy attention.' [Current Biology 26 , 1–6, November 7, 2016] back

James Watson, Bill Laurance, Brendan Macke, James Allan, Theworld's carbon stores are going up in smoke with vanishing wilderness, 'The Earth’s last intact wilderness areas are shrinking dramatically. In a recently published paper we showed that the world has lost 3.3 million square kilometres of wilderness (around 10% of the total wilderness area) since 1993. Hardest hit were South America, which has experienced a 30% wilderness loss, and Africa, which has lost 14%.' back

John Rodden and John P. Rossi, A Book More Equal Than Others, ' [Commonweal's] editors and contributors neither anathematized Orwell nor sprinkled him with holy water. Instead they simply gave him the respect they thought he deserved, welcoming his support for the cause of liberal democracy and intellectual freedom without soft-peddling his hostility to Catholic Christianity. He was, in Commonweal’s judgment, a skeptical humanist from whom American Catholics could learn a great deal. On the seventieth anniversary of Animal Farm’s appearance in the United States, that verdict warrants reaffirmation.' back

Jonathan Sheehan, Teaching Calvin in California, 'In my history of Christianity course, we read a number of challenging writers. Each one I ask students to read with as much sympathy, charity and critical perspective as they can muster. But nothing outrages them — not the writings of Augustine or Erasmus or Luther — more than two or three pages of John Calvin. Calvin was the most influential religious reformer of the 16th century. His theological imagination and organizational genius prepared the way for almost all forms of American Protestantism, from the Presbyterians to the Methodists to the Baptists. He was also a severe and uncompromising thinker. The Ayatollah of Geneva, some have called him.' back

Kevin Brophy, On the life of an adjective, 'Adjectives have always been out there, mobs of them pressing on the outside walls, their faces against the windows, their shoulders at the doors. They just want to be inside close to all the nouns that have gathered indoors over the years.' back

Mark Beeson, Soft power and the institutionalisation of influence, 'Australia’s relationship with the US, especially its critically important strategic dimension, is institutionalised at the highest levels of government. The annual Australia-US Ministerial Consultations (AUSMIN) talks, originally established by the Hawke government, are the quintessential example of this process.' back

Matthew 10:29, Divine providence, '29 Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from the will of your Father.' back

Matthew 5:38, Turn the other cheek, '38 You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye and tooth for tooth.’ 39 But I tell you not to resist an evil person. If someone slaps you on your right cheek, turn to him the other also; … ' back

Max Fisher, Another Cease-Fire in Syria? It Could Mattter, Even if It Fails, 'Two Notre Dame political scientists, Madhav Joshi and J. Michael Quinn, last year published a study examining 196 cease-fires and peace deals from 1975 to 2011. They found something surprising: One of the best predictors of a peace agreement’s success is simply whether the parties had prior agreements, even if those earlier cease-fires failed. Not even a war’s duration or its intensity can so reliably predict a peace deal’s outcome. Neither does the poverty or ethnic diversity of the combatants. “Failures pave the way for better agreements down the road,” Professor Quinn said.' back

Max Fisher, Obama, Acknowledging U.S. Misdeeds Abroad, Quietly Reframes American Power, 'WASHINGTON — It would have seemed surprising from any other president, but has become practically routine for President Obama in his final year in office: acknowledging the United States’ unsavory history in a country he was visiting. This week, it was the C.I.A.-led bombing and paramilitary campaign that devastated Laos during the Vietnam War. While the president stopped short of apologizing, he was, in his words, “acknowledging the suffering and sacrifices on all sides of that conflict.” ' back

Maxwell-Boltzmann statistics - Wikipedia, Maxwell-Boltzmann statistics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'In statistical mechanics, Maxwell–Boltzmann statistics describes the statistical distribution of material particles over various energy states in thermal equilibrium, when the temperature is high enough and density is low enough to render quantum effects negligible.' back

Michael Colborne, Russia revives Sovoet-era psychiatric punishment: Crimean Tartars, dissenters suffer, 'The resurgent Soviet-era practice of punitive psychiatry has shut away a number of dissenters and activists who have dared to speak out against the Russian government. In 2012, opposition activist Mikhail Kosenko took part in mass protests against Russian President Vladimir Putin's inauguration for a third term, the so-called Bolotnaya Square protests. He was soon arrested, convicted and confined to a psychiatric hospital for eight months in a verdict human rights campaigners warned was a return to the well-documented Soviet-era practice.' back

Michael Gordon, Revealed: the cost of stopping the boats put at $9.6 billion, 'The cost of stopping the boats has been calculated at more than $9.6 billion since 2013, and will be another $5.7 billion over the next four years, according to a study by Save the Children and UNICEF. The study estimates the cost of keeping around 2000 asylum seekers and refugees on Manus Island and Nauru at $400,000 per person, compared with just $33,000 for those on bridging visas in the Australian community.' back

Michael Slezak, Oil disaster invstigator alarmed by BP Great Australian Bight response, 'A leading global expert on oil disasters has said the response to concerns about potentially faulty equipment in offshore drilling planned for the Great Australian Bight by BP is an early warning sign of problems that could potentially lead to disasters. Bob Bea, an emeritus professor and founder of the center for catastrophic risk management at Berkeley, said what BP, its subcontractor Diamond Offshore Drilling and the Australian regulator had said in response to concerns about faulty bolts was “very alarming”.' back

Mohmmad Javad Zarif, Let Us Rid the World of Wahabism, 'Over the past three decades, Riyadh has spent tens of billions of dollars exporting Wahhabism through thousands of mosques and madrasas across the world. From Asia to Africa, from Europe to the Americas, this theological perversion has wrought havoc. As one former extremist in Kosovo told The Times, “The Saudis completely changed Islam here with their money.” '˜ back

Peter Kornbluh, Why the Obama administration is giving state secrets to Latin American allies, 'Alongside the traditional instruments of statecraft, the Obama administration has developed an entirely new tool: declassifying decades-old secrets of state to share with other governments and their societies. President Obama has used this declassification diplomacy to mend fences with other countries, advance the cause of human rights and even redress the dark history of Washington’s support for repression abroad. Allies are grateful and historians are delighted. And given the depth and range of still-secret U.S. Cold War records, declassified diplomacy has the potential to go much, much further.' Peter Kornbluh is a senior analyst at the National Security Archive and the author of “The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability.” back

Rain - Wikipedia, Rain - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Rain is liquid water in the form of droplets that have condensed from atmospheric water vapor and then precipitated—that is, become heavy enough to fall under gravity. Rain is a major component of the water cycle and is responsible for depositing most of the fresh water on the Earth. It provides suitable conditions for many types of ecosystems, as well as water for hydroelectric power plants and crop irrigation.' back

Robert Mickens, Letter from Rome: A Slain Priest, a Martyr, a Saint?, 'It’s very likely that the bold and thundering words he used at Fr. Hamel’s memorial Mass in Rome will find their way into that final document. “How I wish that all religious confessions would say that killing in the name of God is satanic,” Francis said at the liturgy. You can bet that he and his Vatican aides will be pushing for this denunciation to be in the final message.' back

Semon Frank Thompson, What I Learned From Executing Two Men, 'Regardless of their crimes, the fact that I was now to be personally involved in their executions forced me into a deeper reckoning with my feelings about capital punishment. After much contemplation, I became convinced that, on a moral level, life was either hallowed or it wasn’t. And I wanted it to be.' back

Soap bubble - Wikipedia, Soap bubble - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'A soap bubble is an extremely thin film of soapy water enclosing air that forms a hollow sphere with an iridescent surface. Soap bubbles usually last for only a few seconds before bursting, either on their own or on contact with another object. They are often used for children's enjoyment, but they are also used in artistic performances. Assembling several bubbles results in a foam.' back

Thomas de Aquino, De ente et essentia (Corpus Thomisticum), 'Prooemium Quia parvus error in principio magnus est in fine, secundum philosophum in I caeli et mundi, ens autem et essentia sunt quae primo intellectu concipiuntur, ut dicit Avicenna in principio suae metaphysicae, ideo ne ex eorum ignorantia errare contingat, ad horum difficultatem aperiendam dicendum est quid nomine essentiae et entis significetur et quomodo in diversis inveniatur et quomodo se habeat ad intentiones logicas, scilicet genus, speciem et differentiam. . . . ' back

Thomas L Friedman, Donald Trump's Putin Crush, 'When it comes to rebutting Donald Trump’s idiotic observation that Vladimir Putin is a strong leader — “far more than our president has been a leader” — it is hard to top the assessment of Russian-born Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion, which The Times’s Andrew Higgins quoted in his story from Moscow: “Vladimir Putin is a strong leader in the same way that arsenic is a strong drink. Praising a brutal K.G.B. dictator, especially as preferable to a democratically elected U.S. president, whether you like Obama or hate him, is despicable and dangerous.” ' back

Tim Wallace, Oceans Are Absorbing Almost All of the Globe's Excess Heat, 'Heat Accumulates in the Oceans Since 1955, more than 90 percent of the excess heat retained by the Earth as a result of increased greenhouse gases has been absorbed by the oceans, leaving ocean scientists like Eric Leuliette at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration feeling that 90 percent of the climate change story is being ignored.' back

Timothy W. Jones, Breaking news: marriage has very little to do with religion (and vice versa), 'Australia has a long tradition of secular government, and also of toleration of different religious traditions. That includes those regarding marriage. This tradition of difference and tolerance was summarised last week by Australia’s most senior Anglican, Archbishop Philip Freier. Writing to all Australian bishops about the proposed marriage plebiscite, he said the church should accept marriage equality if it comes into law: We can still stand for and offer holy matrimony between a man and a woman as a sacred ordinance given by God, while accepting that the state has endorsed a wider view of marriage.' back

Tracy Chevalier, 'Writing is a magic trick that still surprises me when I put pen to paper', 'But what is going on when my pen is scratching, pausing, scratching? I am performing a magic trick that still surprises me. I am in this world, at my desk or kitchen table, but I am simultaneously holding in my head another world full of people I have never physically met but know to their core. That world and those people pour out through my pen: rough – often very rough – but insistent.' back

Wetting - Wikipedia, Wetting - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Wetting is the ability of a liquid to maintain contact with a solid surface, resulting from intermolecular interactions when the two are brought together. The degree of wetting (wettability) is determined by a force balance between adhesive and cohesive forces. Wetting deals with the three phases of materials: gas, liquid, and solid.' back