15 November 2011

Notes - Merlyn's navigation explained / time in thought

         Mid-morning. The furnace is being cleaned and conditioned for winter. Carol has a luncheon and is preparing. You are thinking about the four-sided chessboard square, the ends of which are present from the top and bottom of the disk. Let’s work through this.

         You made a model and took a couple of photos. Drop in chessboard model A.



         Now that you see the five sides above (you are looking through the sixth side), focus only on the backboard as reference.




         First, using the flat back chessboard as a reference, create a photo with the center white with the four surrounding blacks after counting over four squares from the bottom left of the back board (ending with the black square) and up four (ending with the white square). – Amorella




         Imagine Merlyn looking from one end of these nine squares to the nine opposite B ends. Now, imagine you are at the nine unopened doorways at the far A end, the end you see right in front of you. The white squares, if you were to walk into any of them, see the River Styx to their right; the four black squares see the River Styx to their left but the ground level is along the vertical right side of the square. However, in both white and black environs, dawn rises on the other side of the Styx. DAWN rises in the EAST thus you have the directional reference point on the horizon; DUSK is always on the WEST.

         Another way to perceive this is to think of the nine square as a three dimensional cube, like a die. The same for the full sixty-four squares as a cube, yet, overall, and from the outside the cube appears to be a circle, a green disk.

         This guideline reminds Merlyn where he is as well as where he is not. The nine-square above could just as easily be on other regions of the board, for example, at the bottom left corner. Merlyn distorts the reality, the green disk, into a series of three-dimensional sections or regions of chessboards. His mind creates a three-dimensional space where none exists just as the other Dead do.

         How to navigate? Think of a honeybee.

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Distance Information
With increasing distance the number of circuits (8's) per unit time decreases and the length and duration of the individual circuits increases. For example, for a goal at 100 meters it makes 10 short circuits in 15 seconds but at 3 km only 3 long circuits in the same time. The duration of the wagging part has the best correlation with distance. The distance is calculated based on the expenditure of energy on the flight towards the source (a head-wind increases it). Each recruited bee averages many dance circuits or even several dances from different bees to calculate the distance. For each bee species a distance-frequency curve can be plotted.  It is remarkably precise, especially if the distance is not close to their foraging range limit.
Compass Information
If the dance floor is horizontal (the least common case in Nature), the indication of direction is straight-forward: the wagging (straight) portion of the eight-figure dance points towards the food source (and in the same direction as the bee runs through it). But, what does the dancing bee use as compass to accurately point in the right direction? The bee reference is the direction of the sun. This can be demonstrated easily by covering the sky and using a lamp as an artificial sun: the direction of dancing will rotate, always maintaining the same angle with the lamp as the angle with the sun during direct flight towards the food.
If the dance floor is vertical the indication of direction requires a higher-level language that can communicate horizontal directions with an indirect, symbolic, representation. In a vertical plane the natural reference is gravity, so the dancer replaces the real reference, the sun, by the "UP" direction. For example, if the bee maintained the sun 70 degrees to her left when flying towards the nectar, the wagging portion of her dance will point 70 degrees in the clockwise direction from the upwards vertical direction. The bee transposes the solar angle into a gravitational angle!  On an oblique comb the gravitational transposition works well up to an angle of about 10 degrees to the horizontal.

From: www.polarization.com/bees/bees.html
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And,

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Navigation of insects is believed to be composed of rather simple, isolated sensory-motor routines that are learned and opportunistically applied to solve quite complicated navigational tasks (refs. 14, but see also ref. 5). For example, bees and ants learn the directions and distances of their travels between nest and food sources by path integration (6), use the sun compass to apply these memories, and use landmarks to calibrate measured distances (7, 8). Also, bees can retrieve flight directions from landmarks when the sun compass is not available (9, 10). Importantly, bees are believed to relate all these navigational decisions to the origin of their flight path, the hive (4, 6, 11), and thus may apply a navigational motor routine that brings them back to the hive whenever a landmark is recognized to which they had associated the heading and distance measures of the home directing vector. The prevailing view is that bees do not “compute” the location of a landmark from this vector information but form some simple associations between landmarks and the motor commands that constitute the flight along the actual settings of their dead-reckoning system (bearing and distance to home) when they pass the landmark on their orientation flights.

From: www.pnas.org/content/102/8/3040.full
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         We will work Merlyn’s navigation system with a honeybee combination from above. Also, each door square on the board can be thought as a honeycomb.




         Each square tube from end to end and top to bottom. Sixty-four square shaped tubes horizontally and sixty-four square shaped tubes vertically. They share the same space (as it were) but do not recognize it; the ‘senses’ from memory are blind to it. – Amorella

         So, in effect, heartsansoulsanminds are in two ‘places’ at once.

         This is simplified but that is the gist. You are wondering if Merlyn needs some sort of charm in order to navigate intuitively via polarized light and a soul-centered dead reckoning on each of the shamans. Instead of searching for food Merlyn searches for a specific cultural-mind soul and targets it. He knows the twelve human shamans (see below) , and the thirteenth, an early shaman of the marsupial-humanoid culture, Elderfeld, the Dancer, first mentioned in Braided Dreams, “Pouch Text – Nine” ‘Fragment C’.

         As a reminder here are each of the twelve shamans and Elderfeld: (the meaning of the shaman’s name is in parentheses).

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1. Assyria: Ishtar – Woman Shaman > [Star]
2. Babylonia: Enki – Shaman [Lord of Earth, High Priest]
3. China: Jun – Shaman [Truth]
4. Egypt: Amenhotep – Shaman [Pharaoh]
5. Greece: Panagiotakis – Mother’s Shaman ** [Holy]
6. India:  Amrita – Woman Shaman  [immortality]
7. Indo-European:  Teja – Shaman [Luster, Glow, Sharpness]
8. Israel:  Meir – Shaman [Light]
9. Japan: Kagami – Woman Shaman  [Mirror]
10. Olmecs: B'alam – Shaman [Jaguar]
11. Peru: Tiwanaku Shaman [Stone in the Center]
12. Phoenician:  Dido – Woman Shaman  [Virgin]
13. Marsupial-humanoid: Elderfeld – Woman Shaman > [X]
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         That appears to take care of the navigation details without a need for a charm.
         It works for me, orndorff. – Amorella.
         I have a question, at the conclusion of book three, Merlyn has ‘returned’ among the Living. He has no living shaman, which would be fourteen, what do we do at this point?
         We give him one, Richard Graystone. Post. – Amorella.
         Who would have thought?

        The time is 2112 hours, at least according to the greater group of humans on this region in the world. Doug sent you a note worth thinking about. Here it is:
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Dick, I have been meaning to send you an email of what I learned on through the worm hole about time. It appears that when you try to combine quantum mechanics and the general theory of relativity, time disappears from all the equations. Because of this, time is not necessary to describe the universe and some are claiming now that since time is not necessary, time must be merely a human illusion and that the past, present (now), and future all exist simultaneously. The big question we should be trying to answer is why it seems that we can only travel to the immediate future from now. Also I saw an episode about death and do we exist after death. According to some, our mind/being/ information is quantum mechanically entangled with the universe and when we cease to exist in our current bodies the universe still knows about us and keeps our existence as long as the universe exists. Wow! Look forward to reading your place of the dead.
Doug
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         You sent a reply but what is important [in the novel] is this, the past, present and future do exist as a unit of ‘the present now’ because the Living are both conscious and unconscious of such. The Dead, in the Merlyn novels, are ‘conscious’ of a ‘forwardness from death’ because the stages of heartansoulanmind exist in different ‘fields’ of your humanity. Merlyn can return to the original Rebellion and he can return to his own ‘death’ time period of the seventh century. Merlyn worked his way up (or over) to the twenty-first century through Richard Graystone, through a process of two-dimensional grammatical physics [the novels] and more particularly through the passionate ‘thought’ of the novels being put into place on the page. The engine here is ‘heartanmind’; the ‘body’ is soul. This is the simple metaphysics that keeps the Dead ‘alive’ beyond physics and even beyond quantum physics [entanglement].
         More tomorrow, as time permits. Post. – Amorella.   

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