The Earth and the Turtle

In ancient times the earth was said to be a flat slab riding on the back of a turtle and below that more turtles, one upon the other, all the way down. The same is so today, but the scope is the full universe and all its parts, and the turtles are the mathematical and other models created for support and understanding.

We remain powerless against its forces, against its origin, passing, future, and even time. In fact, over the past few centuries the corps of turtles have changed abruptly every couple of decades. From Newton's mechanics to Heisenberg's uncertainty, to the current M-theory, the turtle-carriers seems to be changing at an increaing rate.

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Human Simulation is Possible - by Humans

Human Simulation: Agent-Based Modeling and the Computational Case for Our Reality 1. Introduction In the essay, we introduce the notion that humanity could be a deliberate simulation based on an extremely simple single-celled organism, hardly anything more complex than that. This will allow an (apparently) new interpretation of the notion that humanity is simulated, but that there is no master engineer at a massive number of dials and switches, responsible for every twist and turn of our universe and lives. We begin with the notion that the universe exists and operates under its own laws. So, given the Earth [2] , when and where life first began, it was infused with a living agent, self-actualized, reproductive, and with other basic rules for its operations, interactions, and much of what single-celled organisms do today. The idea from this occurred some years back when writing code in ActionScript (formerly Flash), I was able to create...

No Sympathy From Me

Suicide Coming Home Many years ago, a friend hung himself in his basement. I was a pall-bearer at his funeral. I was shocked I was so asked. I did this. I did not understand why a good-looking fellow, intelligent, kindly, and true could do such a thing. He did. I do not. His family suffered greatly. Yet he left no issue. Thankfully. To my mind Country singer Mindy McCready, 37, showed us the very height of personal selfishness by committing suicide. By giving birth to two offspring, she accepted the responsibility to raise her newborn and six-year old son. She abrogated it spectacularly. (As did the father a month ago.) Though she may have suffered depression for any number of reasons, she has little sympathy from me for leaving behind a legacy that is now lost, is now parent-less, and may drift into problems of their own in the future. There is shame and heartbreak in all this, but blame should be...

The Calculus of Ideas and Patterns

Introduction. When dealing with ideas, patterns, intuition, and brainstorming, we need operations or rules not unlike those of arithmetic. The goal is not proof, a finished device, or a fait accompli , but rather a foundation for further investigation and study. In some cases, these operations may yield a proposition, that is, something capable of being proved. In this sense, they form a practical logic of intuition. The article concludes with a few select examples from a variety of venues. Setting. We are working with a given idea, problem, or project, or simply just thinking. Our aim is to discover pathways, patterns, or conceptual connections that may be useful. The following operations describe ways in which ideas and patterns can be generated, transformed, or refined. These also work toward understanding the imagination. Yet, this framework is distinguished from formal logic and proof. We are tempted to call them as “soft logic” because while nothing is proved, reasons...

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