First Blog

  Big money . Want to get rich?   Invent a biodegradable ink .   With such chemistry, errant youths could have all the tattoos they desire, and not suffer their whole lives with visible proof of temporary insanity. Bigger money .  You see Facebook ,Twitter, Instagram, and the like as social apps .   It seems that modernity has an unlimited appetite for such apps.  These transcend the now ancient letter, morning coffee, and telephone conversation by miles, even light years.  Create a new such app.  Easy to say, difficult to do,but the rewards are extravagant.  Really big money . We know the national debt (in 2015) is about 19 trillion dollars.   A lot of money this is.   But what does it mean?   We are crossing scales or orders of magnitude, and this is difficult for almost all people.   Suppose I said that a lifetime is about two billion seconds. (Actually, 2.2 billion seconds.) This is a magnitude of such a value to make it incomprehensible by any measure.   But when I say

We are a nation of heaps.  We live in heaps.  We respond only to issues when they become heaps - and then rarely.  So, what’s a heap? The heap paradox comes from rather vague predicates.  You’ve often heard of a heap of sand or a heap of trouble.  What this means is roughly we cannot distinguish individuals (such as grains of sand from a pile) from the others.  In fact, it is more complicated.  The ancient interpretation of this paradox (also called the sorites paradox ) is to resolve the question as to when, by removal of individual grains of sand, it is no longer a heap?  In this note, we look at heaps from the reverse perspective.  For example, when we add grains of sand to a collection, when does the collection cease being a collection and becomes a heap?  Of course, this paradox has no real resolution, but the word “heap” does seem to apply to many issues of the day. The (reverse) heap paradox is a key social and political situation in the USA.  At