Oh my, where to begin? I haven't posted because I'm doing several things at once, and in a number of instances, where time is essential. I can't let the pecans languish in their husks too long or they'll get moldy, even inside. The last of my monarch larvae have all turned into pupae at this point, so I need to worry about making wing tags out of produce stickers because Monarch Watch warns against purchasing stickers for the wrong year, so screw that. Etc etc etc etc...and on the mathematics scene, just coming down the pike is news about a rather long-standing, obscure proof by a Japanese mathematician that is only now drawing attention: he takes over 500 pages to show proof of "The ABC Conjecture", just as Stephen Hawking contemplates a black hole paradox , others revise the string theory, and computer scientists start to bemoan the possibility that there may be NO way to effectively compute long sequences (whether it be the human genome variations or working out the final decimal place that Pi computes to in decimal, I guess).
Please, people--you consistently insist on using a number system that considers imaginary numbers to be real, and you think you haven't gone completely bonkers proclaiming that certain solutions using this number system are simply not possible. You guys should be the poster boys for irrational numbers rather than be proud mathematicians, in my humble view. Einstein wasn't a mathematician per se, you know, so dwell on that as long as it takes until the situation finally dawns on you.
Consider the widely acclaimed brilliance of Stephen Hawking, for instance, the guy who threw a party for time travelers and reported that nobody showed up. He doesn't see the flaw in his premise, that what he claimed to have proven is that NO intelligence ANYWHERE in the universe has EVER developed time travel, as in NEVER AT ANY TIME, AT ANY LOCATION IN THE UNIVERSE. Capaldi's Doctor Who took a sour turn lately, too, in the science/math department by erroneously citing The Bootstrap Paradox and the Faraday Cage and I suppose just to make the claim that the Doctor Who series has finally opined that it's worthwhile for the series to take the science seriously again in its script even if it did less than a half-assed job of it.
The good news for Doctor Who is that whomever wrote Matt Smith's script hit the mathematical nail on the head when it was stated, "humans are so----linear." That, people, is the mathematical and scientific description of the difficulty, even with Mr. Hawking, in a nutshell.
Even with loop-backs, string theory is, well, infernally linear. So is the computation of a lengthy sequence. So would be the computation of any time traveler likely to encounter that Bootstrap Paradox. All the time travel paradoxes I've seen listed online make the erroneous presumption of linearity, and so we arrive at why Mr. Hawking is in error just because no time traveler from any time, from any point in space in the universe, showed up at his party. A chess game is a perfect example of sequence from opening to end that is not linear, but at the same time it's a perfect example of why it's a mental trompe l'oeil to claim that it's amazing for chess masters to play several games at once, win every time against anyone less of a "genius", and even play "multi-dimensional chess" to boot. Take a wild guess why a computer is capable of playing a game of chess.
Chess is too damn predictable, that's why. So, any person can claim to be able to see far enough into the future to win at a chess game or multiple chess games played at the same time (yeah--THAT would be a non-linear enterprise, too, wouldn't it), because when you're capable of making moves that preclude the possibility of other moves, you know how the future moves are going to go. So anyone watching in amazement at a chess master is basically watching as much an illusion as watching a master magician insofar as what you're thinking about how it's possible is entirely wrong.
The linear-minded looks at a chess board and figures out to the nth power how many moves are possible. The chess master, on the other hand, figures out how many moves get ruled out if his first five moves are such-and-such, which is why such opening moves (and response moves, for that matter) get formal names, as named gambits. The irretrievably linear mind is convinced that one can never prove a negative, while the chess master, in his opening gambit, proves that certain moves cannot be made, proving negatives throughout the progression of the game. You can't solve any sudoku puzzle without proving negatives, either, and goodness knows how non-linear THAT game is, even though it does incorporate linearities. It is not confined to linearities like the frustrated mathematicians who are convinced that there's no shortcuts to long sequence calculations and that those bogus time travel paradoxes means that time travel is impossible.
Well, Stephen--time just doesn't work that way. Just don't give up on trying to understand it. The reason why the mathematic proof of "The ABC Conjecture" had to take no less than 500 pages is because even among high level theoretic mathematicians, they remain frustratingly and infernally too damn linear. That, and their reliance on a faulty number system that treats imaginary and irrational numbers as real things, not to mention inable to establish accurately the precise ratio of Pi. Seriously--"quadratic time" talked about re: the Wagner-Fischer algorithm is clearly an improvement over strictly linear computing, but you braniacs still can't figure out the branched conditional exclusion chess game method of narrowing that down even one bit? While we have computers that are capable of playing chess using that method?? Gimme a stinkin' break already. You guys grasp the mathematics of fractals but you fall down on THIS job. Sheesh.
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You were expecting maybe a lengthy screed about the Dem debates, hm? It's too early.
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