vol VII: Notes
1999
Notes
[Notebook BOOK 4/5/94 DB 50]
[Sunday 7 March 1999 - Saturday 13 March 1999]
[page 193]
Sunday 7 March 1999
a) Human structure/global structure
b) policy responses (N397:688 25 Feb 1999) Hulme et al
Monday 8 March 1999
. . .
New definition of religion = industry devoted to the construction and maintenance of humanity.
Natural = consistent with the world as we know it.
R is big business.
History section is dominated by analysis of war and my understanding of the role of religion in war. This role is starkly visible in the Second World War. The Nazi vision of humanity was so abhorrent to the Allied vision of human ...
The war was driven by the contrast between the Nazi and Allied visions of humanity and
[page 194]
how people should be treated.
Religion makes war possible because it binds people into large groups which may come into conflict. War is a downside of religion that is of special interest to this site. Just as disease drives much medical and biological research, so war and human conflict in general are the pathology that drives us to understand the role of religion.
Every constructible thing can be mapped onto numbers. Without this mapping thought and planning are not possible, and thee is nothing intelligent we can do about the unmeasurable.
We approach the problem of construction from a very abstract POV. You will not see much ceremony, smell much incense or hear much music in the early days of this site, but these things will come. The heights to which a religion (or any other structure) may rise is controlled
[page 195]
by the depth of its foundations and the strength of its construction. Here we are still in the design and specification phase of the job, and so free to have a wish list that may eventually be trimmed by reality.
Popes and Ayatollahs may do their best to appear poor, but in fact they are at the centres of power and not struggling at the fringe for survival and a little recognition.
Since the size of the permutation grows rapidly with the number of elements permuted, there is strong pressure to increase the size of the substrate.
The essence of entropy is the count. What is being counted is secondary, but gives some physical interpretation to the form ENTROPY.
SILENCE (Wittgenstein, Tractatus)
Religion lies at the boundary between the achievable and the infinite. We must learn to respect the silence, whose existence is
[page 196]
modelled within the TNN.
. . .
Purpose of law or rule is to exclude an evil.
. . .
[page 197]
love
theology/religion
technology/culture
governance/politics
. . .
Tuesday 9 March 1999
Wednesday 10 March 1999
Theology comprises all knowledge as religion comprises all action and love joins the two,
The two hierarchies ENERGY & entropy
Day is little patches of conscious logic
[page 198]
in an unconscious sea of being.
This pattern sea of being with rational moments is also structure we see in quantum mechanics.
Put entire text in the DB.
One goes into debt in order to improve oneself. Stealing is in a sense an unapproved loan.
Rationalization: accepting the fact and seeking to explain it.
Normalization: denying the validity of the facts that do not fir the theory.
We want a religion based on the norm, not the exception (miracle).
The industrial realisation of any good idea requires an infinity of nuance to fit it into the actual world in which it its to be implemented.
[page 199]
Thursday 11 March 1999
Friday 12 March 1999
Saturday 13 March 1999
All this dialogue has to make sense to the dozer drivers and ditch diggers who work at the cutting edge of modern technological fantasies.
. . .
INTERNET
Space of minds linked by language.
Religion is part of the software industry - the design and downloading of software packages for newborns.
Technology = the theory of network design.
SECURITY = NO LOOPHOLES
eg Natural Religion safety.
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Copyright:
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Further reading
Books
Click on the "Amazon" link below each book entry to see details of a book (and possibly buy it!)
Aquinas, Thomas, Summa Theologica (translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province), Tabor Publishing 1981 'Brother Thomas raised new problems in his teaching, invented a new method, used new systems of proof. To hear him teach a new doctrine, with new arguments, one could not doubt that God, by the irradiation of this new light and by the novelty of this inspiration, gave him the power to teach, by the spoken and written word, new opinions and new knowledge.' (William of Tocco, T's first biographer)
Amazon
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| Keynes, John Maynard, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Macmillan 1936-1964 The classic twentieth century economics text that revealed that there are more ways to get an economy to grow than simply balancing the books.back |
Kolmogorov, A N , and Nathan Morrison (Translator) (With an added bibliography by A T Bharucha-Reid), Foundations of the Theory of Probability, Chelsea 1956 Preface: 'The purpose of this monograph is to give an axiomatic foundation for the theory of probability. . . . This task would have been a rather hopeless one before the introduction of Lebesgue's theories of measure and integration. However, after Lebesgue's publication of his investigations, the analogies between measure of a set and mathematical expectation of a random variable became apparent. These analogies allowed of further extensions; thus, for example, various properties of independent random variables were seen to be incomplete analogy with the corresponding properties of orthogonal functions ... '
Amazon
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Malthus, Thomas, and Davis Souden (Editor), Works of Thomas Robert Malthus, Pickering & Chatto Ltd 1986 Amazon Product Description
'The Pickering Masters "Works of Thomas Robert Malthus" is the first and only collected edition of the works of this major thinker. Texts have been edited by an expert team to reflect the development of Malthus' thought. The collation of the texts of different editions of his major works show, both in small details and in the substantial development of the argument, the progression of the writer's ideas. Texts of the first and second editions of the "Principles of Political Economy" and of the second and sixth editions of the "Essay on the Principle of Population" have been collated and variant readings printed as footnotes. The first edition of Malthus' most famous book, the "Essay", is essentially a different work from the second and subsequent editions, and is here printed complete.'
Amazon
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Stephenson, Carl, and Frederick G Marcham, Sources of English Constitutional History: Volume II: A Selection of Documents from the Interregnum to the Present, Addison-Wesley Educational 1990 Jacket: '. . . All major parliamentary acts and proceedings are included, allowing the reader to trace the development of the British political stance from the constitutional experiment of the Interregnum to the present. Important new documents and a new bibliography are included in this edition.'
Amazon
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| Stiglitz, Joseph E, Freefall: America, Free Markets and the Sinking of the World Economy, W. W. Norton & Company 2010 Amazon Product Description
' . . . The Great Recession, as it has come to be called, has impacted more people worldwide than any crisis since the Great Depression.
Few are more qualified to comment during this turbulent time than Joseph E. Stiglitz. Winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics, Stiglitz is “an insanely great economist, in ways you can’t really appreciate unless you’re deep into the field” (Paul Krugman, New York Times). In Freefall, Stiglitz traces the origins of the Great Recession, eschewing easy answers and demolishing the contention that America needs more billion-dollar bailouts and free passes to those “too big to fail,” while also outlining the alternatives and revealing that even now there are choices ahead that can make a difference. The system is broken, and we can only fix it by examining the underlying theories that have led us into this new “bubble capitalism.” '
Amazon
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Papers
| Hulme, Mike, et al, "Relative impacts of human-induced climate change and natural climate variability", Nature, 397, 6721, 25 February 1999, page 688-691. 'Assessments of the regional impacts of human-induced climate change on a wide range of social and environmental systems are fundamental for determining the appropriate policy responses to climate change. Yet regional-scale impact assessments are fraught with difficulties, such as the uncertainties of regional climate-change prediction, the specification of appropriate environmental-response models, and the interpretation of impact results in the context of future socio-economic and technological change6. The effects of such confounding factors on estimates of climate-change impacts have only been poorly explored. Here we use results from recent global climate simulations and two environmental response models to consider systematically the effects of natural climate variability (30-year timescales) and future climate-change uncertainties on river runoff and agricultural potential in Europe. We find that, for some regions, the impacts of human-induced climate change by 2050 will be undetectable relative to those due to natural multi-decadal climate variability. If misleading assessments of—and inappropriate adaptation strategies to—climate-change impacts are to be avoided, future studies should consider the impacts of natural multi-decadal climate variability alongside those of human-induced climate change.'. back |
| Nowak, Martin A, Joshua B Plotkin and Vincent A A Jansen, "The evolution of syntactic communication", Nature, 404, 6777, 30 March 2000, page 495-498. Letters to Nature: 'Animal communication is typically non-syntactic, which means that signals refer to whole situations. Human language is syntactic, and signals consist of discrete components that have their own meaning. Syntax is requisite for taking advantage of combinatorics, that is 'making infinite use of finite means'. ... Here we present a model for the population dynamics of language evolution, define the basic reproductive ratio of words and calculate the maximum size of a lexicon.'. back |
Links
| Boltzmann constant - Wikipedia, Boltzmann constant - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The Boltzmann constant (k or kB) is the physical constant relating energy at the particle level with temperature observed at the bulk level.'Values of k[ Units
1.380 6504(24) × 10−23 J K−1
8.617 343(15) × 10−5 eV K−1
1.380 6504(24) × 10−16 erg K−1 back |
| Lebesgue integration - Wikipedia, Lebesgue integration - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'In mathematics, Lebesgue integration refers to both the general theory of integration of a function with respect to a general measure, and to the specific case of integration of a function defined on a sub-domain of the real line or a higher dimensional Euclidean space with respect to the Lebesgue measure. This article focuses on the more general concept.' back |
| Mustapha Kemal Atatürk - Wikipedia, Mustapha Kemal Atatürk - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (indeterminate, 1881–10 November 1938) was a Turkish army officer, revolutionary statesman, and founder of the Republic of Turkey as well as its first President.
Atatürk became known as an extremely capable military officer by being the only undefeated Ottoman commander during World War I. Following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, he led the Turkish national movement in the Turkish War of Independence. Having established a provisional government in Ankara, he defeated the forces sent by the Allies. His successful military campaigns led to the liberation of the country and to the establishment of Turkey. During his presidency, Atatürk embarked upon a program of political, economic, and cultural reforms. An admirer of the Age of Enlightenment, he sought to transform the former Ottoman Empire into a modern, democratic, and secular nation-state. The principles of Atatürk's reforms, upon which modern Turkey was established, are referred to as Kemalism.' back |
| Paganism - Wikipedia, Paganism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Paganism (from Latin paganus, meaning "country dweller", "rustic") is a blanket term used to refer to various polytheistic, non Abrahamic religious traditions. Its exact definition may vary: It is primarily used in a historical context, referring to Greco-Roman polytheism as well as the polytheistic traditions of Europe before Christianization. In a wider sense, extended to contemporary religions, it includes most of the Eastern religions, and the indigenous traditions of the Americas, Central Asia and Africa, as well as non-Abrahamic folk religion in general. More narrow definitions will not include any of the world religions and restrict the term to local or rural currents not organized as civil religions. Characteristic of pagan traditions is the absence of proselytism and the presence of a living mythology which explains religious practice. back |
| Planck constant - Wikipedia, Planck constant - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The Planck constant (denoted h), also called Planck's constant, is a physical constant reflecting the sizes of energy quanta in quantum mechanics. It is named after Max Planck, one of the founders of quantum theory, who discovered it in 1900. . . . Planck discovered that physical action could not take on any indiscriminate value. Instead, the action must be some multiple of a very small quantity (later to be named the "quantum of action" and now called Planck's constant).' back |
Teresa Cerojano, Phillipine health chief, church fight over condoms, The Associated Press
Monday, March 8, 2010; 3:21 AM
'MANILA, Philippines -- On Valentine's Day, Philippine government health workers hit the streets of Manila to hand out roses and condoms to passers-by.
The message was clear in a country with a relatively small but rapidly growing HIV-positive population: Avoid unprotected sex.
It didn't get far. Within days, leaders of the powerful Roman Catholic Church began urging the faithful to reject condoms, reigniting a long-running battle over contraception in the overwhelmingly Catholic nation ." back |
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