Dialogos of Eide

Friday, December 11, 2009

What Began all Else Follows

ISAACSON: The virtue of tolerance, which I think is the most important virtue we need in the 21st century. When Thomas Jefferson wrote the first draft of the Declaration, he had a great line, "We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable." And Franklin crossed out "sacred and undeniable" and put, "We hold these truths to be self evident." [Franklin] said we need to be a very tolerant nation in which our rights are based on reason, not based on religion, and I think in this century, we have to be tolerant of all religions and all tribes, and that was the thing that Benjamin Franklin taught us.Isaacson on Benjamin Franklin book

Benjamin looked to the native population of the early Americas, and in the spirit of good science asked that this constitution remove religious dogma from it's inception. Native, and immigrant treated the same principled without due cosideration?

It is the belief then for me that inside we are all not so different.

The questions about democracy's seem to be precluded these days by the injustice that one might feel is taking place at the time. It orientates the mind to ask what use these democracies if they cannot protect the rights granted under these constitutions. Some might think that loosing sight of the message of what constitutes that democracy is to loose sight of it in the skirmishes all around it, in gay issues or gender inequalities. Racism.

I never did see these things as productive to the understanding of equalities( not that they did not exist or were necessary issues to try and understand), that we administer with regard to respect and right to expression, but more the understanding that all three could be understood if we went further into our own makeup to understand that this effort is to find "a beginning within us" that is much purer and designed prior too, the time we may take to spend our lives here in this environ.

I have really tried to look past all this to get to the "heart of the matter." Not to be drawn into those skirmishes( does not mean I do not care). It was better for me to understand what it is that applies to all people regardless of these differences of opinion about and what is felt as inhibiting the right of expression.

I mean being apart from the American dream and living in Canada, these principles did not escape myself as I look to my own founding fathers and the start of countries that became democratically based in principal.

Top 10 Most Interesting 4th of July Facts

9. Benjamin Franklin and John Adams were given an offer to write the Declaration of Independence but refused.

Franklin and Adams’ reason for turning the offer down was because they believed that Americans would be prejudiced if they learned that they were the ones who wrote it. But that did not stop Franklin from putting in a good number of corrections before the declaration’s final draft was done. One of these was inserting the line “and the pursuit of happiness” to substitute for the version Thomas Jefferson wrote that only had “property” on it.

So this became more the effort to understand the historical to try and bring perspective to what all peoples have in common, that we do not see these differences "in the inequalities" but to grant the patience and foresight to see all humanity regardless of these things. (Not to practise escapism)

So there has to be something said about what and how you feel inside to administer perspective and time fought in those skirmishes, to see that one can be affected and feel that they are labelled and are fitting a certain profile according to the idea of what those skirmishes mean.

The Power of Myth, by Joseph Campbell
With Bill Moyers,

Myth and the Modern World, Pg 31,

"Campbell:Yes. This is the first Nation in the world that was ever established on the basis of reason instead of simply warfare. These were eighteen-century deists, these genetlemen. Over here we read, In God We Trust." But that is not the God of the Bible. These men did not believe in a Fall. They did not think the mind of man was cut off from God. The mind of man, cleansed of secondary and merely temporal concerns, beholds with radiance of a cleansed mirror a reflection of the rational mind of God. Reason puts you in touch with God. Consequently, for these men, there is no special revelation anywhere, and none is needed, because the mind of man cleared of its fallibilities is sufficiently capable of the knowledge of God. All people in the world are capable of reason. All men are capable of reason. That is the fundamental principle of democracy. Because everybody's mind is capable of true knowledge, you don't have to have special authority, or a special revelation telling you that this is the way things should be.

So yes I do not waste time being "in the conflict" but ponder more the facets of the equilibrates to see that the measure of politeness and respect, lies not only in the act of writing those constitutions, that by recognition then, any business person inclined, will recognize the company adventure, to also know, that the other side of this writing can be for non profit.

People who gather to form based on the adoptions in principle will speak to goals,structure and etiquette of the organization.

Monday, December 07, 2009

What Does Information Mean in Science?

Only time will tell if Einstein was correct when he said, "But the creative principle resides in mathematics. In a certain sense, therefore, I hold it true that pure thought can grasp reality, as the ancients dreamed."

The March 29 burst changes everything," said co-author Dr. Stan Woosley, University of California, Santa Cruz. Just as the Rosetta stone helped us understand a lost, ancient language, this burst will serve as a tool to decode gamma-ray bursts. It's now known for certain that at least some gamma-ray bursts are produced when black holes, or perhaps very unusual neutron stars, are born inside massive stars, according to the team.

Most certainly it is not without scientific value that I would say that all means to measure information, has to have a "simplistic modality" with which science garners it's view about and is correlative too. So in this sense, this program although dating back too, December of 2007, it's values are still retained.

So with this regard to the article and program below, information was an entropic realization in the expression of this universe. What are the constituents that form the state of the universe?

I enjoyed the humor as it manifested with this group of people. If anything is to help one remember the context of this information it always seems to be deeper entrench in memory if it can be light hearted and funny, as I found this hour and half to be.

WATERLOO, ON, December 17, 2007 - A recent panel discussion about ‘The Physics of Information’ from Canada’s Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI), will air across Canada on CBC’s ‘Quirks and Quarks’ radio program. The Public Lecture will be broadcast via CBC Radio One on Saturday, January 5th from 12:06 to 1:00pm.

The program includes four top scientists who gathered in Waterloo, Ontario, in early December to hold a discussion for general audiences about the very essence of information and how this might inspire fruitful new approaches to some of the hardest problems in modern physics. Over 600 people attended to learn how a greater appreciation of information relates to the paradoxes of quantum mechanics, the beginning of the universe and our understanding of black holes. The insights were surprising, enlightening and even controversial.See: The Physics of Information: From Entanglement to Black Holes

http://streamer.perimeterinstitute.ca/mp3/885c534d-2140-496a-8f73-6db23b011504.mp3

Now also, within this context, if one were to think of the ? and where all four forces joined, then what said this state prior too, cannot be allotted to the energy "before compartmentalization." Is this not how us humans crystallize the way in which we experience this reality? That at birth, and with some now, such centering, in weighting the sensory categories, help to define what existed scientifically as a concept of what begins, begins as it did in the beginning of this universe.

Fundamental Forces

This perspective may be confusing for some, but until you see emotive values expressed as artistic renditions that are evoked by Kandinsky as he did in his artwork, or, others who evoke this "cross wiring" as to how sounds and color associate, then how is it what gathered in the human perspective to allot reality the way it is? A "sensory adaptation" to methods to which we define aspects of the reality and seek to embed methods to which we measure that reality.

Wassily Kandinsky-Yellow, Red, Blue
1925; Oil on canvas, 127x200cm; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

September 18, 2009–January 13, 2010Pioneer of abstract art and eminent aesthetic theorist, Vasily Kandinsky (b. 1866, Moscow; d. 1944, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France) broke new ground in painting in the first decades of the twentieth century. His seminal pre–World War I treatise Über das Geistige in der Kunst (On the Spiritual in Art), published in Munich in December 1911, lays out his program for developing an art independent of one’s observations of the external world. In this and other texts, as well as his art, Kandinsky strove to use abstraction to give painting the freedom from nature that he admired in music. His discovery of a new subject matter based solely on the artist’s “inner necessity” occupied him throughout his life.

Also.....

The term "Composition" can imply a metaphor with music. Kandinsky was fascinated by music's emotional power. Because music expresses itself through sound and time, it allows the listener a freedom of imagination, interpretation, and emotional response that is not based on the literal or the descriptive, but rather on the abstract quality that painting, still dependent on representing the visible world, could not provide.

So it is a question then in mind that what began in the very beginning of this universe, also is closely related to what and how we began as we evolved toward the manifestation from another pre-existing state headed toward materialization in the bodily functions, according to this evolution, are standard in expression.

Credit: Weiqun Zhang and Stan Woosley

This image is from a computer simulation of the beginning of a gamma-ray burst. Here we see the jet 9 seconds after its creation at the center of a Wolf Rayet star by the newly formed, accreting black hole within. The jet is now just erupting through the surface of the Wolf Rayet star, which has a radius comparable to that of the sun. Blue represents regions of low mass concentration, red is denser, and yellow denser still. Note the blue and red striations behind the head of the jet. These are bounded by internal shocks.

Human after all, yet capable of experiencing the reality and factoring all measure of, as a truth verification for all that arrive here. An" internal recognition" of an "outward expression into reality." If one cannot follow the sequence of evens here, then how is it we can ever ask what begins anew, that the jets them self emit actionable qualities for the new reality? Pushes back time to some beginning. These attributes are measurable quantities that are signaled by, and are represented in the valuations portrayed on the tscans.

Credit: Super-Kamiokande/Tomasz Barszczak Three (or more?) Cerenkov rings

Multiple rings of Cerenkov light brighten up this display of an event found in the Super-Kamiokande - neutrino detector in Japan. The pattern of rings - produced when electrically charged particles travel faster through the water in the detector than light does - is similar to the result if a proton had decayed into a positron and a neutral pion. The pion would decay immediately to two gamma-ray photons that would produce fuzzy rings, while the positron would shoot off in the opposite direction to produce a clearer ring. Such kinds of decay have been predicted by "grand unified theories" that link three of nature's fundamental forces - the strong, weak and electromagnetic forces. However, there is so far no evidence for such decays; this event, for example, did not stand up to closer scrutiny.

See:Picture of the Week

So we use measurable methods in which to calculate time in the milliseconds when at that time such expressions amounts too, and exhibits, all of the fundamental forces and the methods to their expressions.

Supernova Starting Gun: Neutrinos

.....Next they independently estimated how the hypothetical neutrinos would be picked up in a detector as massive as Super-Kamiokande in Japan, which contains 50,000 tons of water. The detector would only see a small fraction of the neutrinos. So the team outlined a method for matching the observed neutrinos to the supernova's expected luminosity curve to figure out the moment in time--to within about 10 milliseconds--when the sputtering star would have begun emitting neutrinos. In their supernova model, the bounce, the time of the first gravitational waves, occurs about 5 milliseconds before neutrino emission. So looking back at their data, gravitational wave hunters should focus on that point in time.

Monday, November 23, 2009

An Idea: Percolating to the Surface

If one cannot see the dynamical relation toward "localization of the energy" it will never make sense how such energy can be used to advance sustainability. While they are close in the thinking, the idea, still remains apart from acknowledgement of the substance of the proposal.

Thin-Film Solar with High Efficiency
Solexant is printing inorganic solar cells with nanomaterials.
By Katherine Bourzac

Solar cells made from cheap nanocrystal-based inks have the potential to be as efficient as the conventional inorganic cells currently used in solar panels, but can be printed less expensively. Solexant, a company in San Jose, CA, is currently manufacturing solar cells to test the technology. In order to compete with other thin-film solar companies, Solexant is banking on simpler, cheaper printing processes and materials, as well as lower initial capital costs to build its plants. The company expects to sell modules for $1 per watt, with efficiencies above 10 percent.

Nanocrystal solar: The solar cells at top were made on a roll-to-roll printer from an ink consisting of the rod-shaped inorganic semiconducting nanocrystals shown below. The cells were printed on a flexible metal foil and will be topped with a glass plate.
Credit: Solexant

The company has licensed methods for growing nanocrystals and making them into inks from Paul Alivisatos, professor of nanotechnology at the University of California, Berkeley and interim director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. (Alivisatos is on Solexant's board of directors.) Alivisatos says the advantage of these materials is their potential to combine low cost with high performance. Solar cells made from crystalline silicon are efficient at converting sunlight into electricity, but they're expensive to manufacture. To bring down the cost, companies have been developing thin-film solar cells from semiconductors that don't match crystalline silicon's performance but are much less expensive to make.

Solexant's goal is to make cheap thin-film solar cells with relatively high efficiencies. It would not disclose what the nanoparticle inks are made of, but the company says they are suspensions of rod-shaped, semiconducting nanocrystals that are four nanometers in diameter and 20 to 30 nanometers long. The Solexant cells are printed on a metal foil as the substrate. Nanocrystal films are simple to print but have poor electrical properties. Electrons tend to get trapped between the small particles. "The trick with these cells is how to deposit the materials on the fly in a way that makes a very conductive surface," which in turn ensures decent light-to-electricity conversion, says Alivisatos. Solexant begins with nanocrystals because they're easier to print, and heats them as they're printed, causing them to fuse together into larger, high-quality microcrystals that don't have as many places for electrons to lose their way.

The remaining parts of the solar cell, including the electrical contacts and a light-absorbing layer, are also printed on the flexible metal films. This process allows Solexant to print very large areas. When complete, the cells are cut and then topped with a rigid piece of glass.

I wanted to keep a record of these links for examination so besides the blog posting here, a direct link to the authors of this record keeping.

Evidence of Solar PV, Battery and Conservation Advancements

Solar PV

Batteries and Storage

Conservation and Efficiency

Electric Vehicles

Thursday, November 19, 2009

Gian Paolo Lomazzo

Self-portrait of Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo

Gian Paolo Lomazzo (26 April 1538 – 27 January 1592; his first name is sometimes also given as "Giovan" or "Giovanni") was an Italian painter, more remembered for his writings on art theory, belonging to the second generation that produced Mannerism in Italian art and architecture.

Gian Paolo Lomazzo was born in Milan from a family emigrated from the town of Lomazzo. His early training was with Giovan Battista della Cerva in Milan. He painted a large Allegory of the Lenten Feast for San Agostino in Piacenza (1567). He also painted an elaborate dome with Glory of Angels for the Capella Foppa in San Marco in Milan. He also painted the Fall of Simon Magus in the wall of the chapel.

Lomazzo became blind in 1571, and turning to writing, produced two complex treatises that are milestones in the development of art criticism. His first work, Trattato dell'arte della pittura, scoltura et architettura (1584) is in part a guide to contemporary concepts of decorum, which the Renaissance inherited in part from Antiquity, which controlled a consonance between the functions of interiors and the kinds of painted and sculpted decors that would be suitable; Lespingola offered a systematic codification of esthetics that typifies the increasingly formalized and academic approaches typical of the later sixteenth century.

His less practical and more metaphysical Idea del tempio della pittura ("The ideal temple of painting", 1590) offers a description along the lines of the "four temperaments" theory of the human nature and personality, containing the explanations of the role of individuality in judgment and artistic invention.

Lomazzo's criticism took into account three aspects of critical viewing of works of art: doctrina, the record of discoveries— such as perspective— that artists had made in the course of history; prattica, the personal preferences and maniera of the artist, and iconography, the literary element in arts. Lomazzo’s contribution to art criticism was his systematic extraction of abstract concepts from art, not merely a recounting of the marvels of verisimilitude and technique and anecdotes of the works' reception among contemporaries of the type that Giorgio Vasari had reported in the previous generation.
Giovanni Ambrogio Figino and Girolamo Ciocca were his pupils.

***

The Fall of Simon Magus is a subject taken from The Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine and it involves a contest between a sorcerer at the court of Emperor Nero and Saint Peter. Nero is seen enthroned on the left while Saint peter and Saint Paul are on the right. Simon Magus, endeavouring to prove his magical powers, attempts to launch himself from a wooden tower towards heaven, but even though supported by demons his experiment fails and he falls to the ground. See:Web Gallery of Art

Coffee and Donut?

A continuous deformation (homeomorphism) of a coffee cup into a doughnut (torus) and back.

Similarly, the hairy ball theorem of algebraic topology says that "one cannot comb the hair flat on a hairy ball without creating a cowlick."

***

This fact is immediately convincing to most people, even though they might not recognize the more formal statement of the theorem, that there is no nonvanishing continuous tangent vector field on the sphere. As with the Bridges of Königsberg, the result does not depend on the exact shape of the sphere; it applies to pear shapes and in fact any kind of smooth blob, as long as it has no holes.

In order to deal with these problems that do not rely on the exact shape of the objects, one must be clear about just what properties these problems do rely on. From this need arises the notion of homeomorphism. The impossibility of crossing each bridge just once applies to any arrangement of bridges homeomorphic to those in Königsberg, and the hairy ball theorem applies to any space homeomorphic to a sphere.

Intuitively two spaces are homeomorphic if one can be deformed into the other without cutting or gluing. A traditional joke is that a topologist can't distinguish a coffee mug from a doughnut, since a sufficiently pliable doughnut could be reshaped to the form of a coffee cup by creating a dimple and progressively enlarging it, while shrinking the hole into a handle. A precise definition of homeomorphic, involving a continuous function with a continuous inverse, is necessarily more technical.

Homeomorphism can be considered the most basic topological equivalence. Another is homotopy equivalence. This is harder to describe without getting technical, but the essential notion is that two objects are homotopy equivalent if they both result from "squishing" some larger object.

Equivalence classes of the English alphabet in uppercase sans-serif font (Myriad); left - homeomorphism, right - homotopy equivalence

An introductory exercise is to classify the uppercase letters of the English alphabet according to homeomorphism and homotopy equivalence. The result depends partially on the font used. The figures use a sans-serif font named Myriad.

Notice that homotopy equivalence is a rougher relationship than homeomorphism; a homotopy equivalence class can contain several of the homeomorphism classes. The simple case of homotopy equivalence described above can be used here to show two letters are homotopy equivalent, e.g. O fits inside P and the tail of the P can be squished to the "hole" part.

Thus, the homeomorphism classes are: one hole two tails, two holes no tail, no holes, one hole no tail, no holes three tails, a bar with four tails (the "bar" on the K
is almost too short to see), one hole one tail, and no holes four tails.

The homotopy classes are larger, because the tails can be squished down to a point. The homotopy classes are: one hole, two holes, and no holes.

To be sure we have classified the letters correctly, we not only need to show that two letters in the same class are equivalent, but that two letters in different classes are not equivalent. In the case of homeomorphism, this can be done by suitably selecting points and showing their removal disconnects the letters differently. For example, X and Y are not homeomorphic because removing the center point of the X leaves four pieces; whatever point in Y corresponds to this point, its removal can leave at most three pieces. The case of homotopy equivalence is harder and requires a more elaborate argument showing an algebraic invariant, such as the fundamental group, is different on the supposedly differing classes.

Letter topology has some practical relevance in stencil typography. The font Braggadocio, for instance, has stencils that are made of one connected piece of material.

Sunday, November 15, 2009

I Have An Idea

Now as many of you know, a creative individual if they are open enough can bring forth something that is accessible to all, but, if the mind is not in a particular travelling mode, the idea might not appear on it's radar screen for observation.

So understanding what it takes to materialize these efforts on idea manifestation to appearance on a human scale

Now remember, what I propose could in affect revolutionize the auto industry and our dependence on oil and gas? Economy

In a philosophical sense, when thinking about "symmetry as a place." How could one move to such a position creatively to derive a new possibility? See it's effects, here on earth?

The effects of a polarizing filter on the sky in a photograph. The picture on the right uses the filter.

Ya, it's is an idea that could in fact change the way society uses the technologies it has, expands on it, and applies it in a different way.

Economic Translation From Boards

How many of you have joined your fellow brain jammers to seek a solution for a time for creative purpose?

Dr:Lee Smolin's article on arXiv.

Having read it, I find it amusing that the language of economics can be recast in the language of physics. That said a lot of it is hard going, mathematically, though the language he uses is familiar to me, having seen things like conserved currents in quantum electrodynamics.
I think caution should be taken in placing too much emphasis on the math. The ultimate goal of economics is to describe the monetary interactions of humans and how phenomena rooted in the exchange of goods, services, assets and money have broader repercussions (simple example: What happens if everybody saves money? You induce an economic recession, explained by the paradox of thrift.)

Hi Dr.

In bold isn't this what eventually happens when the economy undergoes a correction and we see the events that we do, to realize, that people are now nervous about how they are going to be able to care of themselves? So priorities change, your dollars in your pocket become "more accountable."

BEYOND REDUCTIONISM: REINVENTING THE SACRED

[/quote]Stuart Alan Kauffman (28 September 1939) is an US American theoretical biologist and complex systems researcher concerning the origin of life on Earth. He is best known for arguing that the complexity of biological systems and organisms might result as much from self-organization and far-from-equilibrium dynamics as from Darwinian natural selection, as well as for proposing the first models of Boolean networks.

Kauffman presently holds a joint appointment at the University of Calgary in Biological Sciences and in Physics and Astronomy, and is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Philosophy. He is also an iCORE (Informatics Research Circle of Excellence) [1] chair and the director of the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics.[/quote]

BEYOND REDUCTIONISM

See:Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion (Hardcover)

Self-organization is a process of attraction and repulsion in which the internal organization of a system, normally an open system, increases in complexity without being guided or managed by an outside source. Self-organizing systems typically (though not always) display emergent properties.

Stuart Kauffman - The Evolution of Economic Wealth and Innovation
I think this is indeed the effort that translation occur from new proposals, to what finally happens to the individuals who partakes of this economic endeavor. I find "specialization can give perspective" that would not normally be granted the person on the street, but that it is equally important to understand how these economic factors mathematically can play a part in our everyday lives.

The idea of economic correction itself?

(click on Image for larger viewing)

According to Ray Kurzweil, his logarithmic graph of 15 lists of paradigm shifts for key historic exponential trend.^{[clarification needed]} The lists' compilers include Carl Sagan, Paul D. Boyer, Encyclopædia Britannica, American Museum of Natural History, and University of Arizona.

A person once offered the perspective of Kurzweil and the singularity .

Now, how would this mean anything if there was not some comparison in phenomenological relation that we might push perspective forward?

At what times do we find such a thing taking place that all kinds of new things are introduced to send the system too, already in chaos and find this is an opportunistic time to advance mathematical proposals into the system to see entropic valuation materialize to the person on the street?

A location perhaps, housing the possibilities of the "neurological synapse" considered to be the "white board of creative possibilities?"

***

This Nobel Prize award was of interest to me.

The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2007

"for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory"

Leonid Hurwicz

Eric S.Maskin

Roger B. Myerson

I first started to come to the conclusion in regards to the "social construct" and the relationship it had to the mathematical environmental when I saw the movie, "The Beautiful Mind." It was based on the story of John Nash.

A Theory is Born

PBS: Game Theory Explained

This science is unusual in the breadth of its potential applications. Unlike physics or chemistry, which have a clearly defined and narrow scope, the precepts of game theory are useful in a whole range of activities, from everyday social interactions and sports to business and economics, politics, law, diplomacy and war. Biologists have recognized that the Darwinian struggle for survival involves strategic interactions, and modern evolutionary theory has close links with game theory.

Game theory got its start with the work of John von Neumann in the 1920s, which culminated in his book with Oskar Morgenstern. They studied "zero-sum" games where the interests of two players were strictly opposed. John Nash treated the more general and realistic case of a mixture of common interests and rivalry and any number of players. Other theorists, most notably Reinhard Selten and John Harsanyi who shared the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize with Nash, studied even more complex games with sequences of moves, and games where one player has more information than others.

I wanted to saved a little time, for I would be sure that this highlight in bold would draw attention? So, I thought to preempt it.
You have to understand where symmetry "begins and is possible" to understand that such a place, can exist in the minds of those who go there and become part of the process. This does not define those with agendas, but also recognizes that if we partake as watchers of this process, we can be assured that citizens are given their full rights and respect while capitalism seeks to have it's mandate.

Friday, November 13, 2009

LCROSS Observes Water on Moon

Data from the ultraviolet/visible spectrometer taken shortly after impact showing emission lines (indicated by arrows). These emission lines are diagnostic of compounds in the vapor/debris cloud.
Credit: NASA

LCROSS Impact Data Indicates Water on Moon11.13.09

The argument that the moon is a dry, desolate place no longer holds water.

Secrets the moon has been holding, for perhaps billions of years, are now being revealed to the delight of scientists and space enthusiasts alike.

NASA today opened a new chapter in our understanding of the moon. Preliminary data from the Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, indicates that the mission successfully uncovered water during the Oct. 9, 2009 impacts into the permanently shadowed region of Cabeus cater near the moon’s south pole.

The impact created by the LCROSS Centaur upper stage rocket created a two-part plume of material from the bottom of the crater. The first part was a high angle plume of vapor and fine dust and the second a lower angle ejecta curtain of heavier material. This material has not seen sunlight in billions of years.

See more on link above.

LRO's First Moon Images

07.02.09

1994 Clementine image of moon with Mare Nubium labeled

1994 Clementine image of the moon with Mare Nubium labeled. LRO's first lunar images show an area near this region. Credit: NASA

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has transmitted its first images since reaching the moon on June 23. The spacecraft's two cameras, collectively known as the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, or LROC, were activated June 30. The cameras are working well and have returned images of a region in the lunar highlands south of Mare Nubium (Sea of Clouds).

As the moon rotates beneath LRO, LROC gradually will build up photographic maps of the lunar surface.

"Our first images were taken along the moon's terminator -- the dividing line between day and night -- making us initially unsure of how they would turn out," said LROC Principal Investigator Mark Robinson of Arizona State University in Tempe. "Because of the deep shadowing, subtle topography is exaggerated, suggesting a craggy and inhospitable surface. In reality, the area is similar to the region where the Apollo 16 astronauts safely explored in 1972. While these are magnificent in their own right, the main message is that LROC is nearly ready to begin its mission."

Wednesday, November 04, 2009

On Memory

Today is my 1000th post. I began here in November of 2004. It has been a good time of learning and being propelled forward by other blog posters and blog commentators. It has been a wonderful journey in terms of the education I have received.

Again too, within each of our conversations with who ever that might be, have been the catalyst for writing and giving thought forward to my further gathering of information. So thanks to every one that took time to discuss or exchange ideas.

In a nutshell, what Karim showed was that each time a memory is used, it has to be restored as a new memory in order to be accessible later. The old memory is either not there or is inaccessible. In short, your memory about something is only as good as your last memory about it. Joseph LeDoux

I am not as old as those of sixty, but I have a similar problem that if I do not use it, I tend to loose it.

Psychological mindedness

Psychological Mindedness (PM) is a concept which refers to an individual's capacity for self-examination, self-observation, introspection and personal insight.[citation needed] It also includes an ability to recognize and see the links between current problems within self and with others, and the ability to insight one's past particularly for its impact on present attitudes and functioning. Psychologically minded people have average and above average intelligence and generally have some insight into their problems even before they enter therapy. Psychological mindedness is distinct from intellectualism and obsessional rumination about one's inner problems. The latter is of no help in psychotherapy, but it is a sign of resistance.

Since we can be creatures of habit, it seems to me that neurological pathways are highways so to speak, and not traveling these roads, names of towns can slip our mind. "Waking up by traveling similar journeys" do tend to re-ignited those same neurological pathways. Having a strokes and damaging areas of the brain means that in order to ignite processes in our body expressions means to try and ignited those same pathways that were used.

By correspondence, we see correlations to our own lives. Looking at something and orientating the mind to see angles of something, is to me much like looking deep within the functioning of society to see what lies at the "bedrock or infrastructure" of the supporting objects of perception.

This is where something vaguely familiar eggs the conscious mind to look harder into the reservoir of our own histories. Brings those memories back to the surface.

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The Spotless Mind

Psychology professor Karim Nader is helping sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder lessen debilitating symptoms—and in some cases, regain a normal life.Owen Egan See also: The Trauma Tamer

IC: Why is this research so important?

Karim Nader: There are a lot of implications. All psychopathological disorders, such as PTSD, epilepsy, obsessive compulsive disorders, or addiction—all these things have to do with your brain getting rewired in a way that is malfunctioning. Theoretically, we may be able to treat a lot of these psychopathologies. If you could block the re-storage of the circuit that causes the obsessive compulsion, then you might be able to reset a person to a level where they aren’t so obsessive. Or perhaps you can reset the circuit that has undergone epilepsy repeatedly so that you can increase the threshold for seizures. And there is some killer data showing that it’s possible to block the reconsolidation of drug cravings.

The other reason why I think it is so striking is that it is so contrary to what has been the accepted view of memory for so long in the mainstream. My research caused everybody in the field to stop, turn around and go, “Whoa, where’d that come from?” Nobody’s really working on this issue, and the only reason I came up with this is because I wasn’t trained in memory. [Nader was originally researching fear.] It really caused a fundamental reconceptualization of a very basic and dogmatic field in neuroscience, which is very exciting. It is the first time in 100 years that people are starting to come up with new models of memory at the physiological level.

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Quote:

Anomaly and the Emergence of Scientific Discoveries Kuhn now moves past his initial topic of paradigm to scientific discovery saying that in order for there to be a discovery, an anomaly must be detected within the field of study. He discusses several different studies and points out the anomaly that invoked the scientific discovery. Later in the chapter he begins to discuss how the anomaly can be incorporated into the discovery to satisfy the scientific community.

There are three different characteristics of all discoveries from which new sorts of phenomena emerge. These three characteristics are proven through an experiment dealing with a deck of cards. The deck consisted of anomalous cards (e.g. the red six of spades shown on the previous page) mixed in with regular cards. These cards were held up in front of students who were asked to call out the card they saw, and in most cases the anomaly was not detected.

For certain when composing articles in blogging format your trying to build off of previous information. You gather information so providing links is a way, much like connecting neurons to what was written before. Doing search functions for what is relevant to a topic in Google, or as a mean to use these search functions to help memory point to correlations.

Betrayal of Images" by Rene Magritte. 1929 painting on which is written "This is not a Pipe"
Looking at things from different angles is much like an artist who grabs onto an idea and furnishes us with a expose' into the idea of attention with further presentations visually. It is about seeing the idea manifest toward some kind of reality that is dare to say abstract in it's extrapolations, much as math is used to describe an aspect of nature.

© Salvador Dalí, Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation; used with permission of Philadelphia Museum of Art

Salvador Dalí (Spanish, 1904-1989). Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubicus), 1953–54. Oil on canvas. 77 x 49 in. (195.6 x 124.5 cm). Gift of the Chester Dale Collection, 1955 (55.5). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

© Salvador Dalí, Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

So in a way, while we seem to see true representations "about the fundamental ideas" these manifest toward physical manifestation. These ideas "are covered by abstractions." Much like experience in our daily lives. Sorting through the memory is like sorting through the experience. Recall then becomes something of a challenge when we seek to better understand how we have become who are.

Waking up means to become aware at what resides at the basis of our experiences in society, and how these have manifested in our daily dealings within that society.

As simple as possible then in mathematical interpretation. You see?

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Spending a little time looking into science and art, Dali rose to the occasion in my view in terms of Geometry and the tesseract.

Quote:
In geometry, the tesseract, or hypercube, is a regular convex polychoron with eight cubical cells. It can be thought of as a 4-dimensional analogue of the cube. Roughly speaking, the tesseract is to the cube as the cube is to the square.

Generalizations of the cube to dimensions greater than three are called hypercubes or measure polytopes. This article focuses on the 4D hypercube, the tesseract.

He had a "religious epiphany" moving toward dimensional perspective, and related it too, moving perception toward geometry, as if "other worldly." Many understand his private life not to be so blessed with such religiosity?:)

Quote:
Penrose's Influence on EscherDuring the later half of the 1950’s, Maurits Cornelius Escher received a letter from Lionel and Roger Penrose. This letter consisted of a report by the father and son team that focused on impossible figures. By this time, Escher had begun exploring impossible worlds. He had recently produced the lithograph Belvedere based on the “rib-cube,” an impossible cuboid named by Escher (Teuber 161). However, the letter by the Penroses, which would later appear in the British Journal of Psychology, enlightened Escher to two new impossible objects; the Penrose triangle and the Penrose stairs. With these figures, Escher went on to create further impossible worlds that break the laws of three-dimensional space, mystify one’s mind, and give a window to the artist heart.
See:Penroses Influence on Escher

IN this way, I felt there was a kinship toward artist expression moving minds in science toward an malleable experience in terms of "using the brain and twisting it" one might say. This is a perspective I formed around how we view projective geometry in terms of it leading perspective in that artistic sense.