Concepts to improve your cognitive toolkit?

the

If ocean circulation is chaotic, as most fluid circulations are - especially ones entangled with entire solar systems - ocean currents will never be predictable.

Of course, it will take ten years until I can say "told ya so!" That's the appealing thing about futuristic predictions, by the time you're proven wrong, hardly anybody remembers.

John

Feedback. You fall down, get back up and try again. But you watch other people who do a better job and you learn.

What's the difference between crashing a lot because you're pushing yourself and crashing because you have poor technique?

But what do you do with those failures? Fix them? Or leave them lying there?

I have no definition of "poor technique" because I can always get better.

I've been impressed by how almost everything I've done, even the ones that were technical or commercial failures, turned out to be useful later, sometimes decades later.

John

ple - the

e the

climate

nd

to get a

You do keep on repeating this mistake. Chaotic systems are predictable, but only over a finite time span - ten days for weather and 100 million yuears for planetary orbits in the solar system. Even if the ocean currents were chaotic, which is obviously an open question, they could still be predictable over a useful period.

So why bother making the prediction? The "ten years" is your invention, and it is based on nothing more than your masculine intuition.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

is...

or

ist on

=A0I

sure

s.

ise

scle

=A0 =A0 =A0 ...Jim Thompson

self

ere?

I've had that happen. Some ideas that were impractical when I had them became quite useful after technology had moved on a bit.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Why do you keep on pontificating on these subjects with such obvious hand-waving dogma? Your duplicity and hypocrisy are noted. Try living up to your own stated ideals sometime.

Jon

Sno-o-o-o-ort!

Larkin is about to publish his book, "AoBS" ;-) ...Jim Thompson

--- No, you can't.

There are limits to "getting better" which are impressed upon one's intellect as one grows older and which, if true, means your current technique is lacking, ergo, "poor" in terms of what it might have been had you been more advanced at the time you executed your technique.

---

--- Wait long enough and s*it turns into flowers.

--- JF

I have no idea what you are whining about, or what ideals you refer to. Most fluidic systems of any useful complexity are chaotic. Why wouldn't ocean currents, flailed by climate and planetary motion and tides and stuff, be chaotic? There are lots of natural systems that are chaotic enough that nobody can predict their state very far into the future. Weather is a classic example, so it's hard to accept that climate, or ocean currents and temperatures, weather on longer time scales, are predictable.

What's interesting is how some people get very upset at the very possibility that climate might be chaotic like weather is. I find it rather appealing.

John

The ability to process information slows down and memory becomes not as good, but other than that... what limitations did you have in mind? The ones I've stated do slow you down a bit, but at least insofar as "clever ideas that can make money or better the world" go, I get the impression that folks like Larkin -- who's running his own company -- are more limited by how many employees he can manage to hire, how quickly he can type, how fast PCBs can be built and other *physical* impediments than how quickly he can generate legitimately useful new ideas.

Granted, folks doing very challenging work usually have their most brilliant breakthroughs before their 30's, but one should not base his happiness, satisfaction, and sense of being able to better themselves in life on, e.g., how many of Hilbert's Problems he's solved by any particular age. (Heck, Andrew Wiles first thought he'd proven Fermat's Last Theorem when he was 40, although it took him a couple more years to fix the errors and really provide a correct proof...!)

---Joel

The oceans are lossy - currents involve movement which involves friction - and water is pretty much incompressible. The degrees of freedom available in which to be chaotic are relatively restricted.

and - with planetary orbits - pretty much the only example of a certified chaotic system. Planetary orbits are predictable for the next 100 million years, which pretty much vitiates your oft-repeated claims about unpredictability.

"Hard to accept" in this context is just "John Larkin doesn't want to accept".

As yet there's no evidence to show that climate is anything more than complex. You'd like climate to be chaotic, but in fact the models aren't chaotic.

Ocean currents and temperatures aren't yet well enough measured - let alone understood - for any claim that they are chaotic to be anything more than speculative hand-waving.

Climate, ocean current and temperature aren't just "weather on a longer time scale". They are constrained by thermodynamic conservation rules in a way that weather isn't.

Of course you do. You've been reading denialist propaganda in your right-wing news media outlets, and want to believe that it is not only seductive but also correct.

Unfortunately, your proposition wasn't shared by von Neumann, and his opinion does seem to have been accepted by any number of people who may be expected to know what they are talking about - which you clearly don't.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Sno-o-o-o-ort ;-) ...Jim Thompson

I still thinks like an 18-year-old... then I falls asleep ;-) ...Jim Thompson

ood,

I've

can

an be

ant

To some extent, this may reflect the way the post-graduate education sytem works. Ph.D. candidates are dirt cheap, and supervisors have no inhibitions about throwing students at "impossible" problems. Mostly the students thrash around for about a year before working out how to get out from under by changing supervisors or changing to a related but lesss impossible problem, but every now and again something works out.

The student may not even be very good - Brian Josephson got a Nobel prize for his work at graduate school but has performed at the fruit- cake level ever since

Gerard van't Hooft is a good deal cleverer, but it seems clear that the inspiration that lead to his Nobel prize came from his much older supervisor (who shared the Nobel prize). Van't Hooft failed to follow up at least one other insight that eventually earned other people a Nobel prize.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Well, I haven't reached that point. It's sad if you have.

John

At some point, being better means getting smarter kids to do some of the heavy thinking. I do a lot of that now. Why not? Electronics is so complex nowadays that nobody can be good at all of it.

Electronic design, fortunately, seems to be a skill that does *not* peak young in life, as math and physics and music seem to. Or at least doesn't have to.

John

Yep, exactly.

Just think what a Joerg-Jim Thompson-John Larkin team could do. :-) ...reminds me of this old advertisement from the '80s where a trio of well-known Commodore 64 programmers got together to crank out some code:

Hey, how's the student project of the USB-connected TDR coming along?

You should know. You deride others about climate discussions while fomenting more yourself. I consider you unable to actually see yourself and your own behaviors, even when your nose is rubbed in it. You might try taking your own advice. But I won't hold my breath. Hypocrisy and duplicity would be your middle names if it weren't the case that a large lettered version of pontification hadn't crowded them out.

Jon

I *said* I have no idea what "ideals" you claim I have but aren't living up to.

You deride others about climate discussions

I must post about 1% as many climate-related words as you or Sloman. You guys belch hundreds of lines of OT crud at the faintest provocation... far more than you post about electronics.

I consider you unable to

This is sed. Your rantings about climate are off topic and useless, so can't rub anything. And all your climate theories are untestable in any useful time frame.

You might try taking your own advice.

You are pulling a Sloman now, raving about something you know essentially nothing about, and that can't be verified, in a forum where it is and you are off topic, all so you can cast lame insults. What a lovely couple you make.

Do you actually believe that ocean currents can be simulated far into the future?

John