Notes
[Notebook: DB 60 Spotlights]
[Sunday 4 February 2007 - Saturday 10 February 2007]
[page 91]
Sunday 4 February 2007
I live in bushfire country. I am besieged by solar energy in the form of increasing biomass around me which common prudence dictates that i remove to protect my assets from wildfire. My weapons are weedicide, snips, and a chainsaw, but things are getting to the point where I need a brushcutter and a tractor to maintain a relatively fire safe landscape, or much more manual labour than I can afford if the cleared land lies fallow. If I used it for low biomass horticulture it would probably pay for its own maintenance with a small aggregate expenditure of personal energy. This barrier could be maintained with a fireproof watering system. [the other alternative is to make the house itself fireproof and just sit the fires out].
One lesson if this situation is the advantage of living in concentrated areas so that each person has less perimeter to defend, provided a suitable way can be found to share the work.
Danger in general is represented by pent up energy that can be explosively released, as in modern explosive powered weapons. Security requires that we minimize the potential impact of dangerous situations by developing means to defuse them.
The biowall, a sort of firewall that attempts to protect nature from attacks by poor technology.
[page 92]
Since we all contain stored energy, we are all food for another (and because we all share the same finite stock of building blocks.
My lifestyle, in other words, is not sustainable, its footprint is too large for me to maintain. Short of abandoning the site, the only option is to increase the population so as to have enough workers to keep the site safe.
For some this may not be an issue. The Christian time transformation of value asserts that the greater one's efforts to toe the line, whatever is may be, the greater will be one's reward in the afterlife. Given that the alleged afterlife contains bliss beyond measure and comparison, this function is hard to justify.
There is a perennial tendency to throw out babies with the bathwater. The Nazi, Soviet and Communist Chinese all accepted without apparent question that the current fabric of society must be smashed before it can be remade in their image. So with religion, condemned outright by many as a dangerous anachronism. Dawkins Here we look at religion in evolutionary terms. Classic sociobiology can readily explain cooperation between kin in terms of advantage to certain genes. Wilson But what of unrelated individuals? Here we must generalize from the given history of evolution to the total range of possibilities evolutionarily available to us. In other words we wish to manage a smooth rather than a catastrophic transition from one political state to another. The formalism to study this transition comes from quantum
[page 93]
mechanics and is based on maximum entropy and unitarity being the conditions for stability. A perceived deviation from equilibrium leads us to look for linked disequilibria in order to explain what is happening.
In physics we study the properties of the physical layer abstracting from all 'users' who may be using the physical layer to communicate their own message.
A model allows us to use logic and arithmetic (set theory) to predict the trajectory to be expected given a certain set of initial conditions. Models allow us to construct 'feed forward' and so respond in a more timely manner to changing conditions.
We found religion on a model of god delivered by theology. Here we propose a scientific theology ie we work on the assumption that god is observable. This flies in the face of venerable tradition, but given the current confusion and disaffection in the religious sphere, might be worth a try.
The minimum space spanning a democracy has the cardinality of the tensor product of the spaces of all the individuals constituting the democracy. This is the state of maximum entropy with a given alphabet, whose entropy is held constant by the unitarity constraint.
War and peace: harmony and feud. One can only have harmony if the payback (ie second order effects) is heavily damped. Is this why quantum mechanics is linear?
[page 94]
Because non-linearity is self destructive and therefore has no lifetime in the physical layer?
The Trust does not pay out in cash to ensure that every payment develops its own paper trail and transactions are not prematurely aggregated.
The basic measure of interval in computation space the the atomic action measured by the quantum of action. No smaller actions are observed. [the minimum variety that this quantum can be associated with is one bit, eg a spin half particle.]
There are no hidden variables ie the quantum formalism as we have it has sufficient cardinality to map onto al natural situations.
