usenet weirdness

My wife didn't cite Chomsky once in her psycholinguistic textbook, nor Tesniere, Panini, Whatmough nor Kaminsky either. Tecumseh Fitch doesn't make it either, though we both enjoyed his company.

Psycholinguistics is about what goes on in your brain when you hear, understand an produce language.

Brain imaging doesn't seem to helped much so far, though people do like the idea that it might.

Linguistic is the rather more sterile task of documenting language as it exists, and - to some extent - working out how today's language evolved from earlier (but probably not more primitive) precusors.

It comes with the territory. Theories can be useful tools. The capacity to junk bad and unhelpful theories is a necessary part of the engineering tool-kit.

Ignorance of natural laws isn't any kind of defense against their consequences. Climate change denial is remarkably foolish.

I mostly see Spinoza as an echo of Duns Scotus, then though the "men are natural enemies" I don't get, sort of like that Calvinism is disagreeable.

That said Spinoza has an account of an Integer Continuum which is nice, includes infinity, after Duns Scotus that "infinity is in", though not quite voicing "univocity".

Dual monism sort of points to Heraclitus, or about the oldest of the ancient Greek philosophers of the Western tradition.

I'm good at learning what I need to, and getting deep into quantum physics never turned out to be necessary.

Heaviside's version wasn't quite what Maxwell had originally produced.

The Heaviside step function is just the integral of the Dirac function. If Dirac had known about it he'd probably have called the impulse function the derivative of the step function.

Polyani in "Personal Knowledge" put paid to that approach.

About "sensibility, fungibility, and tractability" of "good theories" or theories that "hold good", or these days for accounts of model theory as equi-interpretable with proof theory that structurally the models of model theory embody abstractions of reason, is this: over time, many considerations of the development were abandoned as with regards to sensibility, fungibility, and tractability, when for example mathematics lagged behind physics or vice-versa. Then, many of the abandoned roads are the natural places to pick up the trail when, at some point, the extensions of the theory have reached their limits, mostly because of their partial or half-accounts being incomplete.

So, that said, it's rather easy to dispatch non-sense itself, yet sensibility can exist without fungibility, and fungibility without tractability, so, merely contradicting some terms of a "good theory" isn't necessarily "bad theory".

Your attitude reminds of Russell's in a sense, Bertrand Russell's, about the "isolation" and "significance", of theories. Basically it's the hypocrisy of the invincible ignorance. Hypocrisy: hypo- / not enough, -crisy / criticality. Etymology of course is of the elements of language and thus linguistics, for people who are textual thinkers, and where language naturally composes.

Something like the grab-bag tool-kit of differential equations helps show that the conflicting criteria of convergence, for examples, makes for always checking the outcomes for sanity.

Then, for realists and "Aristotlean realism" and the like, it sort of results that numbers are ideals. As a sort of practicing electrical engineer, surely you know that there's a distinction between "ideal" and "practical" electrical components, while according to "the theory" there are ideals.

So, having ideals at all hints at least at a weak sort of platonism.

Then the idea that the idealistic tradition and analytical tradition, or mathematical platonism and logicist positivism, are indispensable to each other, has then naturally for an account, even for engineers, where they are of the strong variety.

Maxwell has both E cross B and D cross H, and admits that either is primary.

Maxwell's account of fields is after the rest of the alphabet of the lettered fields of electromagnetism: most of which are potential fields where Maxwell's are called the classical fields, then that in potentialistic theories, the potential fields are the real fields.

The lettered fields of electromagnetism fill most of the alphabet.

I'm not exactly clumsy with my tools.

Then again, I know how they're made.

Do I dig a ditch faster than a deaf-mute ditch-digger? I imagine we could talk about it.

Today's bit was "axe grinding". Let's see, one, five, six, six: six axes to grind.

How about this, "operating system design". I think we could agree that "operating system design" is a high level practical matter involving standards and convention.

Ah here's one, it's the old "management consultant" joke. So, the corporate board really wants to shoehorn value into their holdings ignorant of the other shareholders, so they call in a management consultant to really squeeze blood from the stone from the old factory. The management consultant shakes it up and gives everyone a good fright for their careers and the numbers the next day ticked upward so it's considered a great success. Slavering for more fees, the management consultant one day finds a maintenance man leaning on his broom onlooking the factory floor. The management consultant says "what are you doing today" and the maintenance man says "this" and the management consultant bravely fires him and off he goes. It's going swell then though, a few days later, somebody slips on a peel, then a few days later, there's a broken window. One day, there's a new light on the panel. The next day with a giant crash the entire factory halts.

So you might figure the epilog is penny-wise pound-foolish, or vice-versa, or that a stitch-in-time-saves-nine, here though the management consultant promptly rehires the maintenance man, or a maintenance man. The maintenance man comes in, finds a broom, sweeps up a bit, then leans on his broom overlooking the halted factory. Then the management consultant says "aren't you going to do something", and the maintenance man says "yeah, this is about it".

The other story that comes to mind is about the one fellow who was an engineer and I'd recall his name yet there was some fact that he was a dwarf. So anyways, some great industrialist hears about his great experience with electrical motors and is having a problem with an electrical motor in his plant. So, the engineer comes in, looks around for a few days, then at some point makes a chalk mark on a panel, and says "behind the panel is your problem, fix it". Lo, it was so, and the technicians got it running. The industrialist is curious the process of the engineer, and asks for the bill. The engineer gives him a bill for ten thousand dollars. The industrialist doesn't really understand the process involved, and asks for an itemized bill. The engineer shrugs and writes one up and hands it over and walks off. When the industrialist reads the bill, it reads: "chalk mark: $5. knowing where to put the chalk mark: $9995".

I worked at something like "the local airplane outfit" before, privy to something like the "enterprise resource planning" of the "master execution scheduler".

Certainly. Good engineering, perhaps, but it doesn't lead to understanding of science,

Jan

Chimps can also drop to death by falling from trees.

I saw a proposal to paint a blue line on all buildings in seaside towns at for example + 5 meter above present mean sea level.

Jan

Good for them. The best philosophy for working physicists is "No Nonsense for me".

Oh? And what does it predict for the value of \alpha?

What a waste of time,

Jan

Indeed, it was much better. Maxwell was still stuck on potentials, and his formulation was not properly gauge-invariant. Heaviside's version, which focussed on the directly observable fields made practicl applications much easier. But Maxwell made the crucial step of identifying, and adding the missing term.

It is obvious that you have not seen Dirac's original work, where he introduces the \delta-function. He explicitly says there that introducing the \delta-function as the derivative of the unit step function, (which he calls the \epsilon-function) is an alternative and equivalent way of introducing the \delta-function. He doesn't mention Heaviside by name,

Jan

Jonathon Israel got very interested in Spinoza and points out that a lot of Roman Catholic theologians got very interested in Spinoza and spent a century or so trying to prove him wrong. I don't think that Duns Scotus generated anything like as much interest.

Greek philosophy was great at getting hold of the wrong end of the stick.

If that was intended to be flattering, it didn't work.

My ignorance gets defeated at regular intervals, but there's a whole universe of stuff that I'm going to stay ignorant about, and my potential areas of ignorance get larger every day with people publishing stuff that I'm never going to get to grips with.

Every real component is more complicated than it's ideal version. Every resistor has a parallel capacitance (which I've had to take into account in real designs) and a series inductance which rarely matters. Capacitors and inductors are worse.

Not exactly. Laziness is the first thing that comes to mind. I always check other peoples Spice models to see if their inductors have a parallel capacitance and a series inductance. You can almost always get them form data sheets, but some people don't bother.

I see it more as the butter-fingered "keep it simple" tradition. Good engineers keep things as simple as they can get away with, but they do need to know when they are cutting corners.

The Greenland ice sheet

The West Antarctic ice sheet

Again it could happen quite quickly, and there would be no chance of stopping it if the ice started moving fast and friction heating started melting the bottom layers of the ice sheet.

Why would I have? I was trained as chemist, at a time when chemists needed to know about quantum mechanics, and statistical mechanics

So he probably didn't know much about his work. Dirac was working at Cambridge at that time, and while Cambridge was very proud of it own mathematicians, it tended to be snooty about non-Cambridge mathematics, and Heaviside wasn't even an academic.

Pertinent passages pulled from THE HIGGS FAKE: HOW PARTICLE PHYSICS FOOLED THE NOBEL COMMITTEE by Alexander Unzicker:

Come out with a Number

Today's scientists got widely used to cheap patches when it comes to fixing some contradiction in an ad-hoc manner, but the real problems fall into oblivion. Take, for instance, the fine structure constant, a combination of the constants c, e, ε0 and h. The number 137.035999... is, according to Richard Feynman, "one of the great damn mysteries of physics" and he recommended all good theoretical physicists should "put this number up on their wall and worry about it."

Since Feynman wrote this 30 years ago, none of the 10,000 particle physicists has made any damn progress in that question. It might be difficult, yes, but those who didn't even spare a thought about it in the past 30 years (I bet this is the vast majority of CERN theorists) please don't tell me that you deal with something fundamental. Physics is about the big questions, not about fiddling around with 150 parameters.

...

Nobody at the time seems to have reflected upon the grave epistemological defeat coming along with another, complicating subdivision of elementary particles. The idea of quarks does not explain anything, let alone provide a revolutionary perspective. It is precisely such fake understanding that, without being testable by a concrete observation, has eroded physics, the gradual spreading of the sickness being justified by the argument "we don't have anything better."

Sadly, Richard Feynman, with a mind of refreshing criticality elsewhere, also capitulated, complying with the zeitgeist. "There is much evidence in favor of the existence of quarks and little evidence against, thus let's assume they exist." As if you had to prove that a theory is nonsense instead of proving it makes sense!

An ironic aspect here is that Gell-Mann's quarks, which had to be bound inside the proton, completely contradicted Feynman's original idea of partons, which he thought of as free particles in a (due to relativity) pancake-like deformed proton (a naïve assumption anyway). Once Feynman's authority had been widely used to publicize the concept, nobody cared any more about the inherent contradiction. Instead, by ritualized parroting, the henceforth ineradicable self- deception of the quark model being a "simplification" gained ground among particle physicists. ... Physics Goes Loopy ...the descending size scale atom, nucleus, quark. The nasty suspicion arises that the thing does not end here ... - Emilio Segrè

So how did it come about that today we are told that quarks are the elementary building blocks of matter? What followed is a textbook example of a symbiosis of vague experimental facts and theoretical fantasies with poor predictive power. The wishy-washy regularities that had been christened as "the eightfold way" were classified using the mathematical tool of group theory, or "symmetry groups," e.g. a description of how you may rotate objects in three dimensions (which would be called SO(3)). The math-physics symbiosis here drastically differs from other successful fields like, say, general relativity. There, you compare the predictions with the measurements and get a number expressed in percentages. Group theory instead just plays with qualitative properties of particles, a juggling on a noncommittal meta-level extraneous to physical mechanisms.

This was possible because theorists have abusively generalized the idea of symmetry groups beyond the realm where they made sense. It is perfectly ok to say that the laws of mechanics don't depend on the rotations in three-dimensional space, hence they are "symmetric under SO(3)" (the idea originated from the famous mathematician Emmy Noether). But it becomes ridiculous if instead of real space you apply it to the fancy diagram drawn with "isospin" and "strangeness" as axes. These symmetry operations[XXVIII] have become the dominating paradigm in theoretical physics, although they turned measurable predictions to completelymetaphorical concepts. Richard Feynman once said, about an alleged unification scheme based on such group theoretical concepts:

SU(3) x SU(2) x U(1)? Where does it go together? Only if you add stuff that we don't know. There isn't any theory today that has SU(3) x SU(2) x U(1) - whatever the hell that is - that we know is right, that has any experimental check. Now, these guys are all trying to put this together. They're trying to. But they haven't. Ok?

It is always a pleasure for me to quote that, when debating with particle physicists the alleged "stringent simplicity" of their model. However, much earlier than Feynman, Wolfgang Pauli had hit the point. He called the spreading nonsense "group pestilence." Theoretical physics has suffered for half a century from the infection.