Mid-afternoon. Kim, Paul, Owen, Brennan,
Carol and you had a leisurely breakfast at Mama’s Kitchen II on Seminole Avenue
before you drove over to the airport with them to wish them goodbye. They
should be home from the airport by now with most everything back to normal. You
had a nap while Carol did three loads of bedding and clothes so everything is
caught up and Owen and Brennan’s beachwear can be folded and packed up and
stored until you leave next weekend. Paul even packed some of the major kid
stuff in the trunk so you are ready to go. Tomorrow Linda is coming over,
perhaps with Jen and Jean and the five of you are heading down to Crab Shack II
for lunch after shopping at the nearby outlet mall near SR 301 and I-75.
About
fifteen minutes ago while you and Carol were in the living room a young lady
with husband and a three or four year-old daughter decided she didn’t want to
wear her wet bikini while sunbathing so she took it off, top first to put on a
dry top then bottom for another piece of dry clothing. You are surprised how
quickly you noticed the whole operation. – Amorella
1436 hours. Thanks for reminding me,
Amorella. Kim just called a couple of minutes ago saying they were stopping
near home to get something to eat. She said they had a very good flight plus
the boys slept most of the way, which was not expected but quickly accepted as
a nice blessing for the afternoon.
That’s how you should accept the surprise of
the day, boy, a quick unannounced blessing that though you are seventy-one and
still have some young male in you. - Amorella
1441
hours. I am more comfortable with your dark humor, Amorella.
The clouds are mostly broken up with an
eighty-degree or so air temperature. Once this next load of clothes is done you
are going for a ride north on Gulf Boulevard to Clearwater and return before
sunset. Later, dude. Post. – Amorella
A Few Minutes Before Sunset 9 November
13
2049
hours. A return to Thinking in Numbers by Daniel Tammet and I found on
page 26:
“In his Metaphysics, Aristotle shows that
counting requires some prior understanding of what ‘one’ is. To count five, or
ten or twenty-three birds, we must first identify one bird, an idea of ‘bird’
that can apply to every possible kind. But such abstractions are entirely
foreign to the [Pirahã/Amazon] tribe.”
You are perplexed as how to explain this in
terms of what ‘one’ is in terms of The Place of the Dead or Elysium or
HeavenOrHellBothOrNeither in the Merlyn books. This is a ‘Place’ but there
nothing relative to where it is. The same is true of the ‘one’
heartansoulanmind. It appears to be a ‘bundled’ one but what is the difference
between ‘bundled’ and ‘banded’. You see this as similar to the problem the Pirahã Tribe faces when they do not have the
concept of counting in their culture. Here is what you found online tonight. -
Amorella
** **
SLATE: “What Happens When A Language
Has No Numbers?”
By Mike Vuolo
The Pirahã are an indigenous
people, numbering around 700, living along the banks of the Maici River in the
jungle of northwest Brazil. Their language, also called Pirahã, is so unusual
in so many ways that it was profiled in 2007 in a 12,000-word piece in the New
Yorker by John Colapinto, who wrote:
Unrelated to
any other extant tongue, and based on just eight consonants and three vowels,
Pirahã has one of the simplest sound systems known. Yet it possesses such a
complex array of tones, stresses, and syllable lengths that its speakers can
dispense with their vowels and consonants altogether and sing, hum, or whistle
conversations.
Among Pirahã's many peculiarities is
an almost complete lack of numeracy, an extremely rare linguistic trait of
which there are only a few documented cases. The language contains no words at
all for discrete numbers and only three that approximate some notion of
quantity—hói, a "small size or amount," hoí, a
"somewhat larger size or amount," and baágiso, which can mean
either to "cause to come together" or "a bunch."
From:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2013/10/16/piraha_cognitive_anumeracy_in_a_language_without_numbers.html
** **
2118
hours. I cannot help thinking of the old adage of how many angels can dance on
the head of a pin. Lo and behold I just checked online and discovered this at
‘Improbable Research’:
** **
Quantum Gravity Treatment of the Angel Density
Problem
by Anders Sandberg
SANS/NADA, Royal
Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
[EDITOR'S NOTE: we apologize for the
lack of clear formatting,in this web version, of the mathematical formulae.]
Abstract
We derive upper
bounds for the density of angels dancing on the point of a pin. It is dependent
on the assumed mass of the angels, with a maximum number of 8.6766*10exp49
angels at the critical angel mass (3.8807*10exp-34 kg).
Ancient
Question, Modern Physics
"How many
angels can dance on the head of a pin?" has been a major theological
question since the Middle Ages.[5]
According to
Thomas Aquinas, it is impossible for two distinct causes to each be the
immediate cause of one and the same thing. An angel is a good example of such a
cause. Thus two angels cannot occupy the same space.[2] This can be seen as an
early statement of the Pauli exclusion principle. (The Pauli exclusion
principle is a pillar of modern physics. It was first stated in the twentieth
century, by Pauli.)
However, this
does not place any upper bound on the density of angels in a small area, because
the size r of angels remains undefined and could possibly be arbitrarily small.
There have also been theological criticisms of any assumption of angels as
complete causes.
Stating
the Question Correctly
The basic issue
is the maximal density of active angels in a small volume. It should be noted
that the original formulation of the problem did not refer to the head of a pin
(R�1 mm) but to the point of the pin. Therefore, the point,
not the head, of the pin is the region that will be studied in this paper.
One of the first
reported attempts at a quantum gravity treatment of the angel density problem
that also included the correct end of the pin was made by Dr. Phil Schewe. He
suggested that due to quantum gravity space is likely not infinitely divisible
beyond the Planck length scale of 10exp-35 meters. Hence, assuming the point of
the pin to be one Ångström across (the size of a scanning tunnelling microscope
tip) this would produce a maximal number of angels on the order of 1050 since
they would not have more places to fill.[1]
While this approach
does produce an upper bound on the possible density of angels, it is based on
the Thomist assumption of non-overlap.
Since angels can
be presumed to obey quantum rules when packed at quantum gravity densities, the
uncertainty relation will cause their wave functions to overlap significantly
even if there is a strong degeneracy pressure. If the non-overlap assumption is
relaxed, this approach cannot derive an upper bound.
- See more at:
http://www.improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume7/v7i3/angels-7-3.htm#sthash.oNsWV6eq.dpuf
** **
Here
is what I found at Science Q and A (New York Times, November 11, 1997):
** **
Dancing Angels
By C. CLAIBORNE RAY
. How many angels can dance on the head of a
pin?
. Medieval theologian-philosophers tried to
calculate that incalculable number based on the notion that angels were the
smallest possible physical creatures, though with very large spiritual powers.
Based on that same definition of size, a modern physicist actually made a
calculation for an even smaller dance floor: the number of hypothetical angels
that could dance on the point of a pin.
The calculation was offered in 1995 by Dr.
Phil Schewe, spokesman for the American Institute of Physics. He presented his
idea at a meeting of the Society for Literature and Science.
For the smallest possible angelic size,
Schewe relied on an idea drawn from superstring physics that space itself is
not infinitely divisible, but breaks down at a distance scale of 10 to the -35
meters.
For the size of a pin point, he took the tip
of the IBM scanning tunneling microscope, the one that arranged 35 xenon atoms
in the shape of the letters IBM. The tip tapers down to a single atom.
"So it was really an easy calculation,"
Schewe concluded. "The point is, say, an angstrom across, so you divide
something that's 10 to the minus 10th power meters by something that's 10 to
the minus 35th power, so the answer is 10 to the 25th power angels can fit on
the point of a pin."
From: http://www.nytimes.com/learning/students/scienceqa/archive/971111.html
** **
No comments:
Post a Comment