Why Archy beats Anarchy

The function of a law, a rule or a moral is not to erradicate totally the behaviour against which it proscribes but rather to reduce the probability that the majority of society faces of becoming a victim of that particular behaviour to such a low degree that it becomes more reasonable, from a cost/benefit basis, on the part of any given individual member of that society to forgo taking prohibitive precautions against such an occurence in their day to day lives.

Boy, that was a long sentence.

What I want to express, but perhaps have not done so well enough is to highlight that as a member of a 'lawful' society I do not need to become expert in say some defensive/offensive discipline - such as fencing or shooting or a martial art - because the penalties I will incur in terms of the time invested and risk of injury involved in their pursuit is no longer outweighed by a reducement of the risk of injury and death from - I don't know - a duel for example, or a mugging.

In being a member of a society where such an option exists - ie. paying through taxation for a judiciary system and accepting the governmental veto on my expressing dissatisfaction through direct violence against another person or persons - I incur less penalty than would be entailed by having to aquire the skills and equipment necessary to maintain a reasonable degree of protection within a society without such an externalized system.

However, in realising that no level of judical control - at least a level that would be acceptable in a 'free' society - will ever totally erradicate the threat of violence, loss or injury, and by refusing to take direct responsibility for either their own [absolute] protection or that of others, any individual member of that society must accept their complicity in the effective sponsoring of 'sacrificial offerings' in the form of the people who actually do roll snake-eyes and become the latest statistic on the evening news, if that sacrifice could have been prevented by the acceptance of stricter curtailments on individual freedom by the members of that body politic or a society-wide [and equally shouldered] investment in self-defence.

Those statistics on the news, the lost boys, the chalk outlines on the street, the wounded hookers - they are the price of conscience we [willingly or unwittingly] pay to maintain a both balance of personal freedom from governmental scrutiny and intervention in our private and public lives, and the luxury of non-acceptance for our own welfare.

We forget this at the peril of totalitarianism.

Laws and moral-codes can also be seen to operate as markers dilineating the topography of benefits incurred either by the individual(s) at the expense of a wider group loss, or benefit to the group en toto - embodied within its given form of governence - at the expense of the individual(s) subject to it.

It doesn't have to be a zero sum game - ideally, a good law should aim to keep the expression of a particular human behaviour set within a range such that it benefits both the individual and the social system playing host to that individual.

If that is impossible it should aim at least attempt to curtail the extremity of its expression to a limit where the expense incurred either to the social system or individuals effected by such behaviour (but not benefitting from it), is tolerable, preferably negligible.

For example "the holding, expression, and discussion of different beliefs and ideas amongst individuals."

This carries an attendant behavioural range: One end of this range being freedom of speech, and debate, at the other is repression, violence, murder, vendetta and war.

The laws affixed to this range should aim to keep a given society tolerant enough to stimulate productivity both technologic and spiritual - whilst acting as a buffer against the social-cohesion destroying consequences of fanatacism.

...Continued...

Good Butterfly, Bad Butterfly.

The following was inspired by the film I just saw: The Day the Earth stood still - the 2008 remake with Keanu Reeves - not the 50's classic. Not the worst film I've seen this year, but Jesus H. Christ, philosophically, that film was cheese. And not even good cheese.

Anyway - spoilers - in the end Klaatu [the incarnate son of the sphere-god] sacrifices himself on the cross, er, sphere once again to save humanity [in which he has found some goodness, or at least noble self sacrifice for one's child, or at least PC WASP sacrifice for genetically unrelated black kid - ie: altruism of the non "it doesn't count if it's kin-selection" kind] from the klutches of the vengeful old-testament GORT er, God, er, GORT.

So far so Americanized Post-Christian NewMyth™.

And then, presumably to ensure mankind doesn't fall back into a state of 'evil-world-destroying-exploitativenessnessness' the very biblical plague of nano-locusts eat all our technology, reducing us back to default noble-savagery.

Gee. Thanks. Hyper-intelligent alien zoo-keepers. Duh.

"Just give us a chance" the heroine-scientist says - through tear-stained eyes, clutching the doll-like object of her "proof-there-is-hope-for-humankind" altruism to her diminutive bosom...

...And !POOF! the lights go out. Now we'll be good. Because we 'have a good side' - just like the butterfly above. We can be "good".

Just like that. Poof.

What a fucking great steaming pile of self-deception.

I saw some butterflies yesterday. A very peculiar species. They have two phenotypes - one black, one white. The Black ones are evil. They'll bite you and steal your children, turn them into little butterfly bootees for winter-wear. The White ones, they are good - lotta work for charity, pull you out of an earthquake fallen building, fix your car. Nice. Shudderingly so.

You put them in a jar, isolate them, and they die, all of them. Strange. Then I had an idea, I painted some of the rooms in my house black, and some white. Then I released the butterflies from the jar.

They dispersed in all directions. Randomly, or near as damnit.

The kitchen was jet. The white butterflies all dropped dead in there within hours. The blacks settled down on the lustrous noir and bred. The bathroom was white - there the opposite occurred - it soon dripped with niceness - I never had to wipe my own bottom for as long as the white butterflies were there. Bless. Had to eat take-out though, the blacks kept poisoning the contents of the fridge. Bastards.

The question though is of course...

Why is the kitchen evil and the bathroom good..? Is it the fault of the butterflies..? Did they choose..?

Nah, the enviromental conditions pre-existing to their introduction dictated it. When everything around you is black, when everyone around you is black of heart, you'd better blend my friend, blend. Blend or die.

And this is what Klaatu and the whole extra-terrestrial-sphere-crew forgot in their rush to archive the Earth and erradicate the naughty monkies.

Because when the place in which you live is black and white, but you don't know exactly where you'll land...

...The other day as I was walking past the evil kitchen, on my way to the good bathroom I was surprised to see a grey.

No, not the alien kind.

A grey butterfly, meandering about. Curious, I followed it. It headed toward the kitchen and alighted on the (black) tabletop. All around the evil black butterflies rustled malevolently. Instantly, the grey turned black. And so survived.

I soon saw another, this time it landed on the rim of the bath next to me. The nearby whites all chirruped and sang happy motivational songs. Instantly, the grey turned white.

And this is us. This little grey butterfly. Ready, willing (and able) to do whatever is required, be whatever is required by the prevailing situation, wether enviromental, or social, to survive. It's a self fulfilling prophecy, all life - human, Klaatuan or other, must be like this - because those that don't, overcome by those that do - do not persist.

Evil for evil's sake alone, is always erradicated by the outraged masses, every pretty-cheerleader-shower-mutilation-victim always has a brother/father/mother/uncle.

Goodness - goodness of the spastic, reflexive kind - is exploited, bottled, and enslaved by those very same masses, even though they constantly sing its praises. And why not..? - it's like finding oil in your back yard - if you don't use it, someone else will.

"But life's not so Black and White" I hear you say...

Aha.

No, you're right - it's not. But when push comes to shove - we soon make it that way.

I left a spot in the kitchen a sparkling white - just as a control experiment - and yes, for a while, a few ardent white butterflies toughed it out amongst all those blacks. They were a little constrained for space, but still served as a shining white beacon of hope in those dark, dark times.

For a while.

But you see, soon the blacks got crowded too, the kitchen is only so large. And soon the wingtips of the blacks closest to the white section overlapped the divide. Extending the blackness inward, ever so slightly. This increase in turn meant more blacks could edge along the velvet dark, riding on the wings beneath. Every day more and more of the whiteness disappeared. And soon, black ruled without challenge.

[Btw. The colours are dicated by convention, not by rabid racism on my part. If you like, substitute polkadots for black and stripes for white. I don't care.]

ie: Although the enviroment provides the spur toward goodness/badness - the two traits themselves have a momentum of their very own, which should not be forgotten.

That said then, was Klaatu right..? Do humans have a 'good' side, which can be brought out in times of crisis..?

Er. Yes and no. Yes humans have a good side, but no, it is not brought out by crisis. The only thing that survives a crisis is that which did whatever it had to to survive the crisis. Maybe that involved nice things like bucket chains and singing and helping old ladies out of the rubble. But maybe it didn't, maybe it involved beating your friend to death for his water-bottle and then eating his liver.

Depends on the situation: The blitz for example. Everyone was nice to each other. Why..? They were all equal, because the bombs were a random force, impossible to influence. It could have been anyone's house that got bombed, so everyone helped everyone regardless of ties so that everyone would continue to help everyone, regardless of ties. Shared and inescapable threat produces niceness - just so long as that threat cannot be influenced or sided with to individual beneficiary effect.

But, if you're alone in the desert, or in a lifeboat with not enough water, and a very-very low chance of rescue - then eating your buddy is de-rigueur. Some situations demand niceness, some not-so-niceness.

And, I'm afraid, leaving poor old mankind without its technology... Is the second kind of crisis - the buddy-eating one.

Stupid Aliens. If they'd really wanted to make humanity nice, they should have taken away its reasons to be nasty. Territory, and energy. Our two eternal bug-bears.

So, Aliens, if you're listening. Don't get all GORT on our asses, we're just like you. Give us instead free, clean and abundant vaccuum energy, spaceships that go faster than the pieces of crap we have at the moment, and terraforming technology.

Then we promise we'll be good. Honest.

...Continued...

The Book of Nothing

Notes on "The Book of Nothing" by JD Barrow.

Pg.15: Base ten comes from fingers. Some advanced cultures in history have had base 20 - fingers and toes (three score years and ten, quatre-vignts, quatre-vingt-dix etc.) - some less so 2 or 5.

One noticable one was base 8 an American Indian counting system depending on the gaps between the fingers rather than the fingers themselves.

A Turkish system for remembering differences in month length also counts the gaps and the knuckles of two clenched fists on top of each other - the knuckles being 31 days the gaps less than 31. July/August skip across from the last knuckle of one fist to the first knuckle of the other.

Also relics such as time - base sixty - and angles, degrees - 360. A gross, a dozen eggs.

Pg. 20: Counting system of early Sumer had base ten, but also base 60 as a secondary - from this comes our tradition of time-keeping.

Pg.19: Egyptian counting symbols do not carry numerical information related to position - ie: a particular number's symbol in position X, relative to other symbols, equals exactly the same even should that number's symbol be switched to position Y.

Without "position related numerical information", a blank entry in a composite number need never be marked, and thus a zero never be needed. ie: 11=two cf: 11= eleven --> 1_ = 1 = one cf: 1_ = 10 = ten.

cf: pictographic languages - they do not need blanks between 'words' to convey meaning because each pictograph's meaning is isolate of any other, and individual letters and spelling are not integral concepts.

Pg.25: Positional/placevalue system (a natural progression in efficiency - fewer characters required to write the same number) first appeared in Babylonia in about 2500bc (cuneiform notation - additive base 60).

Pg.27: For Babylonians - the Zero was really simply a 'spacer', they [as far as is known] attached no other deeper philosophic meaning to the concept of 'nothing'. Also it was never used as a 'result' ie: 1-1=0, such a thing was always explained in words.

Pg.39: AD200-458: The Indians (decimal counting system) take the idea of a zero spacer (a dot, rather than the modern 'O') and develop it into a more philosophic signifier of 'nothingness'. They also develop arithmatic - subtraction, multiplication and division and through division by zero, infinity.

"sunya" or "shunya" indian word for "void".

Pg.42: Indian culture, posessing as it did/does an array of conceptualization of nothingness/emptiness were ready to accept the true zero without major realignments of philosophy.

Hebrew traditions view the concept of 'void' with utter repugnance - to them void signified a state of being separate from God, removed from his favours.

Greek philosophies, and their high respect for logic led to an aversion toward the zero as a paradox - 'something' pertaining to be 'nothing' - or simply treating 'nothing' as if it were 'something'.

ie: Assholes.

Pg.49: 900AD - Indian zero - sunya - adopted by Arabic world - translates to 'as-sifr' meaning "empty" or "absence of anything". Passes into English as "cipher"meaning originally 'nothing' or as an insult "nonentity".

Pg.51: "theca"meaning "little circle" referred to the circular zero symbol branded into the cheeks and foreheads of criminals in the middle ages.

Pg.56: Infinity: Most scientists believe infinities are never physically manifest - if they appear in a calculation they simply imply that the theory involved has run up against the limits of its validity (the range of values it can be usefully used to describe cf. Newton with Relativity with Quantum) and that a new theory must be found to replace the mathematical infinity with a finite measurable quantity.

Pg.166: The empty set. How all numbers can be defined using absolutely nothing:

Define zero as the empty set: Ø because it holds no members.

Then define "1" as the set which holds one member - the empty set - {0} ie. {Ø}and "2" as the set which holds {0,1} ie: {Ø,{Ø}} and "3" as the set which holds {0,1,2} ie: {Ø,{Ø},{Ø,{Ø}}}
... ad infinitum.
The null set can define all the rest. Nothing becomes something - Think of nothing. Think of thinking about nothing. Think about thinking about thinking about nothing... The 'nothing' becomes a definable object. A foundation.
Pg.59 God: European christianity tried to wed the two conflicting ideas of divine creation - Greek "god as architect moulding the world from pre-existant materials" with the Jewish "creation from nothing".

Pg.60: "horror vacui" a morbid aversion to nothingness. Seems to be a human trait, all cultures elaborately decorate empty spaces.

Pg.63: Empedocles - water catcher experiment - early vaccuum discovery. 2000 years later Torricelli gives correct explanation. (first made the mercury tube manometer)

Pg.71: Moslem art shows appreciation of the concept of infinity - repeated patterns - no blank space could be left empty - all 'voids' were filled.

Pg.74: Augustine proposes God created time as well along with the world - sidestepping any 'beginning' or 'before' problems with scripture.

Pg.99: AD1643 Mercury is used in barometers because it is the densest liquid (14x more than H2O) - reducing the length of the tube. Torricelli. There is a limit (dependent on density of medium) on the height a liquid can be raised by a vaccuum pump. Air pressure bearing down on the mercury at sea-level = 76mm of Hg.

Pg.142: Disproving the concept of 'ether'. (An invisible medium through which all light, heat and electromagnetic waves propagate. Pronounced "eether" with the "th" as in the word "thought," ether was postulated from the 1600s to the 1800s. Newton/Newtonian physics)
1881 Michelson's experiment (beams of light at 90 degrees - if out of sync at return -> interference bands) shows no evidence of stationary ether.

Pg.145: FitzGerald-Lorentz shrinkage (things contract lengthwise related to their speed eg. 500km/hr = contraction of 0.000000000001%) ie small but effective at very high speeds. It was discovered that this contraction would mask the effect of 'ether' slowing one of the beams of light - so stationary ether was back online as a possibility.

Pg.147: Einstein 1905 - Relativity. All motion is relative:

*The laws of motion and electromagnetism must be found to be the same by all experimenters moving at constant velocities relative to one another.
*The velocity of light in empty space must be measured to be the same by all observers regardless of their motion.

The concept of ether becomes unecessary to explain properties of light and electricity. Einstein took Michelson's experiment as his inspiration.

Pg.155: Geometry. Euclid's plane geometry is a good example of localization - ie. in a small enough area the natural curvature of the earth is negligible, and so Euclid's [and at the time supposedly the only logically consistant ie: Absolute truth] geometric laws adequately describe/predict reality. However, expand the area involved and the curvature does become a factor, and so non-euclidean geometries are required.**

People were so impressed by this 'axiomatic method' (definition>axiom>theorem>proof) that even some philosophers - for example Spinoza - laid out their propositions in the same way. Gimic.

**But Carl F Guass (1777 - 1855) discovered that it was perfectly possible to construct other non-euclidean self-consistant geometries, that worked just as well, except for non-planar surfaces.

Working rules of thumb relating points and lines on curved surfaces were also worked out waaaaaay before the mathematicians got their grubby little paws involved, by potters guilds, for illustrating pottery accurately. Which is funny.

Pg. 180: Gravity - gravity acts on all forms of mass and energy. Gravity itself gravitates - Waves of gravity spread - rippling the curvature of space - carrying energy that in turn acts as a source for its own gravity field. Gravity interacts with itself in a way that light does not.

Pg.182: visualizing the universe. Imagine a stack of holographic cards. Any particular card represents the state of the universe at any instant of time. Now simply weld those cards into one. Et voila.

Pg.205: Lambda. Introduced by Einstein as a new "cosmological" constant. Representing a force opposite to that of gravity (an [attractive] force between two masses which decreases with distance - following Newton's inverse square law) lambda being a [repulsive] force that increased in proportion to the distance between two masses. Balancing out gravity and providing a 'static' universal model - one neither collapsing of expanding eternally. [see pg.273.]

Friedmann finds other solutions saying that a static model is inherrently unstable unless spacetime is absolutely smooth with regard to density. The final expanding universe model becomes standard. 1929 confirmed by observation. (All distant galaxies show a red shift proportional to their distance from the earth as a result of the general expansion of space-time )

Pg.207: Quantum physics 101:

* Energy is quantised: in atoms it doesn't take on all possible values but hikes itself up and down a ladder of specific multiples of h - planck's constant () -




because values of energy between divisions of h do not allow for a whole number of wavelengths to fit within an orbit.

** All particles act as if they were a wave with a wavelength inversely proportional to their mass and velocity. As objects increase in mass, their quantum wavelengths 'shrink' to ranges contained within the boundaries of their physical size, masking any wave-like properties. If the mass of a "particle" is low enough that the quantum wavelength exceeds the boundaries of the particle's physical size, then these intrinsic wavelike properties become dominant - producing novel behaviour.

Get small enough and you cannot measure both mass and velocity with any meaningful accuracy. But probability math gets around this, kinda. Identity holds, we just can't meaningfully examine it.

Pg.209: Erwin Schrödinger and Max Born - Schrödinger's equation describes the probability we will obtain result X from quantum experiment Y. Wave function. The equation preserves determinism at the quantum level - but not at the level of appearances - by providing accurate predictions over time of a pattern of outcomes, some more probable than others.

Pg.210: Planck constant constrictions on energy levels preserve the uniformity of matter - if all energy levels were universally permitted - then each atom, each molecule would be - being effected, on however miniscule a level, by their histories - subtly different, allowing no predictable interaction,
and no life.
Pg.216: No system is ever completely devoid of energy, no vaccuum ever absolute. Thus the definition of vaccuum changes to "the emptiest possible state, the lowest possible energy - the state from which no more energy can be removed". This then becomes the ground state, or vaccuum state. But it is never zero. This is in concordence with the uncertainty principle. ie. if we knew the location of a particle oscillator exactly (as we would, if we removed all its energy and made it still, or at least as still as possible), its energy will still be uncertain - varying by ½hf (one quantum of energy) or zero point motion.
Pg. 273: A non-zero value for Lamda (the lowest state of energy in a vaccuum) results in "vaccuum energy" - inferred from supernovae observations as 10 to the -120th power. [Can be demonstrated by Casimir plates - so close that there are more zero-point fluctuations outside them than in, providing a (very small) inward pushing force].
Pg.222/3: Sonoluminescence. Bombard water with soundwaves - air bubbles form which very quickly contract then disappear in a flash of light. Contracting bubble-walls act like mini-casimir plates..?
Ships at sea, rolling on swells [the wavelengths of which are much longer than the distance between the two ships], side by side in time - the rocking motion of the ships caused by their hulls' absorbance and re-transmission of wave energy can create out of sync wave patterns between them, which cancel each other out - producing an 'energy vaccuum' in the gap as each hull radiates wave energy effectively outward, but not inward - effectively thrusting them together. For example two 700 ton Clippers would have an attractive force of about 2000 kg generated between them.
Pg.226: Solidity and superpositions. How, if an object is mainly empty space with an very small amount of actual matter flying around within it, be solid..? ie. every inquisitive prod being met by resistance at the boundary of a certain volume.
Probabilities. The boundary of a 'solid' object forms naturally at the point where the probability of a resistance generating particle/force being met reaches levels of near certainty. Think of a piece of string being whirled so fast it blurs into a disc. It's still only ocupiying a fraction of the volume, but spin it fast enough and it would deflect anything trying to penetrate the area of its arc.
Pg.227-229: Quantum particles and 4 forces.
Graviton: A massless [therefore having infinite range] particle carrying the gravitic force in exchange. Acts on every particle, even itself.
Photon: A massless [therefore having infinite range] particle carrying the electromagnetic force in exchange. Acts on any particle possessing an electric charge.
W+, W-, and Z° intermediate vector bosons [massive - 90 times heavier than a proton - and the force they mediate has a finite range 100 times less than the radius of an atomic nucleus]: they carry weak interaction forces that act on Leptons (Greek - "light ones") - electrons, muons, tauons and associated neutrinos.
Gluons: Mediate in exchange the strong force (binds atoms into distinct objects) which has a range of about the size of the radius of the largest atomic nuclei. Acts on Quarks (three of which constituate a proton) possessing three 'colours' of an electric charge analogue. The strong force or colour force acts on every particle that carries a 'colour' charge. They are 90 times less massy than bosons.
At least for now, leptons and quarks seem to be the elementary particles - possessing no apparant internal structure.
Note: Dark Matter (the 'missing' matter from the universe) is thought to be carried by 'sterile neutrinos:
Scientists have discovered that neutrinos have mass through neutrino oscillation experiments. This led to the postulation that "sterile" neutrinos exist - also known as right-handed neutrinos. They do not participate in weak interactions directly, but do interact through their mixing with ordinary neutrinos. The total number of sterile neutrinos in the universe is unclear. If a sterile neutrino only has a mass of a few kiloelectronvolts (1 keV is a millionth of the mass of a hydrogen atom), that would explain the huge, missing mass in the universe, sometimes called "dark matter". Astrophysical observations support the view that dark matter is likely to consist of these sterile neutrinos.
Pg.233-6. Virtual pairs. (unobservable)
Quantum vaccuums are never empty - they are a sea of elemetary particles and their antiparticles constatly appearing and anihilating each other quicker than anything can detect them.
For example - a positron and electron appear - tot. mass 2m - 'borrowing' (e=mc²) 2mc² from available vaccuum energy resevoir to manifest themselves - and anihilate - returning 2mc² again. If there time of existance is so small as to not obey the uncertainty principle - (Energy time)
- their existance will be unobservable - hence the term 'virtual pairs'.
However, they still have effect. Possessing charges, they are attracted to, and surround real particles of the opposite charge, acting like padding. (Vaccuum polarisation).
During low energy collisions between real particles, deflections are shallow and slight, because the two point charges never come close, the padding of each gently pushes each away from the other. But in high energy collisions, deflections are shaper, more intense, because the padding has little effect, and the two bare point charges interact. ie: in a high energy enviroment effective electromagnetic interactions become stronger and stronger - it is not a linear progression.
Same principle effects quarks and colour charges - save that the strong force becomes effectively weaker at higher energies.
Pg.237: Asymptotic freedom. The above means that at very high temperatures - 10 to the 27th degrees Kelvin - all the forces become equal in strength. A grand unification.
In the beginning everything was simpler, then as the universe cooled, the forces separated and everything got complex.
Pg.240: Evaporating black holes. Virtual pairs materializing near enough the event horizon of a black hole to have one of the pairs sucked in prior to mutual anihilation, and one of the pair to 'escape' and persist long enough to become 'real' means that the so-called black holes are not black bodies, but radiative bodies.
It also means, because the energy 'borrowed' by the virtual pairs from the local surroundings - in this case the gravitic well of the black hole - is not returned, that the black hole will gradually evaporate away, its energy spent on the creation of new elememtary particles.
Pg.247: Symmetry breaking and critical thresholds. Laws of nature are unerringly symmetrical - they must appear the same to any and all observers in the universe. However, this does not mean that the outcomes of these laws cannot be asymmetrical. Magnetization for example - at high temperature, a metal bar can maintain a stable minima (lowest energy state possible given external conditions) without a polarization/direction. However, below a critical temperature, two stable minima arise - N/S or S/N - only one of which any particular metal bar can adopt.
Cf. Phenotypic canalization.
Pg.249-52: Scalar Fields and universal expansion rates. (hypothetical aid to visualisation) These are fields which have only one atribute. Imagined en toto as a pendulum having two energy components - kinetic, from motion and potential, from location.
Anyway, not too important in detail, the thing to remember is stable states of vaccuum energy with respect to background temperature. ie: an (oscillating) scalar field in a high temperature universe inhabits a single stable 'valley' vaccuum minima. But subsequent lower temperatures means that a scalar field swings up and over the dividing 'rises' between its old stable minima valley, into an adjoining, lower one. And again, and again, with periods of prolonged stability in between.
If the transition between minima is slow - imagine a ball rolling gently, but inevitably, down a rounded-stepped pyramid - this produces an 'anti-gravitic' effect, pushing matter apart, which drives universal expansion at a [vastly] accelerated rate.
Pg.253: Uniformity in the visible universe. Why scalar-field/vaccuum minima-accellerated expansion is absolutely critical to life.
(Visible space - we cannot see further than a distance of about 15 billion light years - ie the distance light has travelled since the beginning of the expansion of 'our' part of the universe.)
(Wherever we look into visible space its temperature and intensity is the same to a tolerance of 1/100,000. However, as it stands presently, the universe is too large to have been traversed by light - so how did this standardization come about..?)
A period of accelerated expansion, beginning very early on in the general expansion of the universe, means that small areas of that infant universe, small enough such that their properties could have been 'standarized' by the transmission of light, could expand to areas of greater magnitiude than visible space at the present time.
These inflations of limited area also serve to iron-out irregularities in space-time, producing a near uniform flatness. However, remaining quantum uncertainty fluctuations (teeny-tiny origionally but expanded out into macroscopic scales during inflation) in the vaccuum so produced act like seed crystals, causing matter to acrete around them. ie: planets, suns and life.
Our universe appears to be expanding at a rate very, very close to the dividing line between a state of eternal expansion and an eventual contraction. The chances of this situation occuring are astronomically small btw.
(note - explained by anthropic principle).
Pg.274. Residual Lambda force (energy level above zero in vaccuum) is equal to 10 to the power -120. This is an extremely low number, but one absolutely critical to the formation of planets/life. A case of no more or no less will suffice.
Doom..? We may not have reached the lowest minima for Lambda. Perhaps we are on the edge of another shelf. If the value for L changes, we are completely fucked. Completely, totally and irrevocably. Fucked.
Pg.278-86: Summary of String theory. (Too long for here).
Pg.296: Theology - schisms of "creation from nothing" and "creation from existing materials".
Pg.304. Roger Penrose's argument for a temporal starting point, and an infinitely dense big-bang, assuming a strict Einsteinian universe.
Pg.308..311: New theory - Bouncing, ever larger universes.
Lambda - turns (too short-lived for life) bouncing universes of a size large enough for its anti-gravitic properties to produce eternal expansion into universes that can support life. Also however, this expansion guarrentees that universe's eventual lifeless uniform entropic state.
Eternal expansion also eventually means isolation and difficulty of information exchange. At the point where everything is moving away from everything else [effectively] at the speed of light no information transmission can be undertaken. The bubble of communication shrinks and shrinks.
Black Swan saviour. In an infinitely long time, anything not absolutely impossible will come to pass.

...Continued...

Why Modern Man is such a Hopeless Fucking Dope.

I'm probably not alone in observing that modern man doesn't really hold up much of a candle when compared to the likes of the old heroes - Beowulf strips down to his tattoos and single handedly boots Grendel's arse back into his mother's crevice, Achilles hacks off arms without breaking a sweat; hell, even James Bond still manages to kick some butt despite having being made to put a lid on the sexist remarks and grow a fledgling social conscience.

Even if we take off the rosey-tinted sunglasses with respect to the past of man, and admit that for every Beowulf in a society there were a couple of hundred thousand wannabes who didn't know which end of a sword was which, couldn't hold their mead and lost fights with their wives, that still leaves an unexplained gap in modern society where some hyper-testosteroned epitomy of broad-shoulded masculinity should be. I mean, name a modern true-blue, unequivocal HERO, without stain or tarnish..?

So what happened..? Did the collective male population of the West just get up one morning and just say to themselves: "Fuck it, I'm gonna wear the pink one." ..? Did the feminists slyly Bobbit the whole lot of us while we were sleeping..? Something in the water..? Other..?

I think it's a double whammy - a combo of Human nature on the one hand - the simple consequences of being a social animal projected through time, added to the recursive effects of techno/socio-economic evolution.

The trouble is, our archetypes make themselves redundant: The classic warrior, the conqueror phenotype, if he follows his nature successfully - and creates a safer world in which his children may prosper - becomes inevitably the 'inventor/creator' of a society in which a lesser example of the extreme he himself represents can succeed. And in doing so, becomes obselete, becomes more than enough, surplus to requirement. Imagine a knight in full armour, toting a 5-foot broadsword, getting on the bus to go to work. Okay, I suppose he'd be guarrenteed a seat, but then chivalry would demand he relinquish it to the nearest damsel.

Is he then, not to fight..? Not to struggle to tame his enviroment..? Despite this knowledge that after the act of taming, of stabillization, he will remain a dangerous relic - the one sword yet to become a ploughshare..?

Not really a choice is it, if he doesn't, someone else will.

Stable societies arising from a long enough 'peace' are self-fulfilling prophecies, for, after the dust has settled, only they persist.

So - Man will always spiral gently into less extreme forms, and women safer, less at threat in this brave but less muscle-requiring new world, will free themselves from the cloister and expand, unfurl their wings. The socio-sexual delineations will blur.

Just as a shell is the bio-technological extention of the snail, and the dam and the lake it creates is the phenotypic extension of the beaver - the car or the gun is equally the extention of the human. In short, for the human species, technological evolution is just as natural, if a little speedier, as genetic evolution.

We are the tool-making apes, take away our hammers, and you take away our humanity.

The archetype of the human inventor, just as the conquerer, is also an almost unwitting intermediary in the progression of technological evolution, and if he does his job well, also sows the seeds of his own era's redundancy, as strength of arm gives way to projectile, fleetness of foot gives way to speed of hoof, and later turn of tyre.

ie: The [technological] levelling of the sexes, with regard to physicality, is a natural outcome of being human. A side-effect almost, of man's natural instinct to augument his - and her - physical capabilities. It was always going to happen, it was just a matter of time.

Technology has tamed the lands where we could not live, or tamed/exterminated those who would not allow us to live there, at the price, if you wish to put it that way, of taming us in turn.

Domestication. Domesticate. Domicile. Domus. House.

We made the world as comfortable as our lounge, not too many sharp-edges, an air-conditioner in every room... Is it any wonder we grew fat and slothful, and let the kids get out of hand..?

But how true is it to say that modern man is a bit of a wimpy big girl’s blouse, and that women are now wearing the pants, having supplanted the male..? Is modern man any less of a man that he used to be..?

It's [far too] easy here, to try to define what attributes and behaviours are 'male' and which are 'female' to give us some footing from which to pass judgement on the degrees of masculinity and femininity that are displayed in the populace of our post-Beowulf society.

So easy in fact it's almost irresistable. And as such serves only to cloud the issue and polarize it's exponents.

A man in a dress is either Scottish, or a drag queen. He is still a man. A man on oestrogen therapy, with breasts and fat depositry patterns in imitation of the female, is still a man. A man who goes further still, and voluntarily has himself castrated, and has reconstructive surgery again to closer imitate the female, is still not a woman.

• All attributes are genderless.
  

My first doubts occurred when I observed children, prior to the differentiating tide of adolescent hormones: They are, apart from the budding genatalia, much the same, in physique and physical capability, as eachother. The games they play are different, but this is a consequence of nurture perhaps, re-inforcing what genetic tendency there may be, of social programming and segregation. However, the behaviors are the same. Little girls jump, little boys jump. Little girls run, little boys run. Little girls play with dolls, little boys play with dolls (abeit ones with scars and guns). Little girls fight, little boys fight, sometimes they fight together.

Most if not all young childrens' games involve co-operative play. They are learning to use their bodies, improving coordination, and learning to act as a group, to achieve a collective goal. Individualistic games, tennis and the like, come later. Come, later and un-naturally if I may go so far.

For children, a little boy on his own, is a sad boy. A little girl on her own, is a sad girl.

ie: Group action and co-operation, is the natural norm for both sexes of the species, not a consequence of some techno-driven social behemoth.

Now, what social strategies do male and female children learn and employ with regard to getting what they want from the adults around them..? Direct confrontation..? No. Rugged individualism..? No. Wheedling, sneaking, coniving, manipulative-play-one-off-against-the-other tactics..? Oh yes. Yes, yes,yes,yes,yes.

ie: Social skills are naturally learned first, by both sexes.

Then comes the change. You know the drill. Bottom line, little boys become stronger and more aggressive than little girls. So, at this stage, the lines of development that for so long ran fairly parallel, separate. Girls continue to learn, develop and polish their childish social (and now also sexual) skills: to influence and gain influence/dominance within a social group into the more mature forms of adulthood.

The boys however, swing away from the development of these skills, to learn how to use, and more importantly control, the new found tools of strength and aggression: to influence and gain influence/dominance within a social group into the more mature forms of adulthood.

ie: the methods may differ, but the goals are the same.

Please note: this diversion of skill-development has this natural result: when an adolescent stops physically changing, and reaches the stable plateau of adulthood, a man is deffeicient in the arena of social/sexual skills when compared with the average woman, and a woman is defficient in the skills of physicality when compared with the average man.

However, whilst strength is an attribute associated with the male. The attribute itself, is genderless. Whilst socio/sexual-manipulation is an attribute associated with the female, The attribute itself, is genderless.

ie: Any woman, if she chooses, may lift heavy things until she can beat the living shit out of Joe Average. Any man, if he chooses, may learn to orate rings around Jane Average. The fact that the upward limit on strength is slightly higher for the male, is inconsequential, unless that male actually persues that limit to its utmost.

ie: strength as a quality, has no intrinsic gender:

- I lift the wife up, say 50 kilos.
- I build a robot, it lifts the wife up, and the baby up too, say 75 kilos.

The machine is stronger than I.

And yet the machine is not a woman, nor a man.

All behavioural strategies are genderless.

In my car, speeding along, I was wondering why the terms 'masculine' gambit/strategy/tactic and 'feminine' gambit/strategy/tactic seemed wrong somehow. This dichotomy bothered me.

Was it a false dichotomy, I wondered. Are there some exclusively male strategies, some exclusively female strategies and whole bunch of in-betweenies..? Genderless..? Available and usable by both sexes, without the baggage of implicit 'femininization' or 'masculinization'.

So I tried to think of a strategy that was completely usable only by a man, or only by a woman.

I failed. They are all, in essence, interchangable.

That surprised me. Then I realaized why.

The flaw lies in the operation of putting the adjective 'Feminine' or the adjective 'Masculine' next to the noun 'Strategy'. They look good together, I'll admit, and that's the problem, they look so fitting, that they decieve.

What is a strategy..?

It is a set of behaviors and actions, undertaken in a fairly strict order, to produce a result, be it at the expense of another or not, always beneficial to the undertaker of the strategy, accordant with their personal criteria.

ie: Action towards desire.

ie: Genderless in essence.

* Though any particular strategy can be instigated and followed through by a male or a female - the successful outcome of this strategy is linked to their individual abillities in the areas relevant.

* A strategy, the success of which is reliant mainly on strength/aggression, will become associated with masculinity, as it is the averagely stronger males who will tend to adopt it through repeated experience. The strategy itself however, as a program of behavior, remains genderless.

* A strategy, the success of which is reliant mainly on social/sexual manipulation, will become associated with femininity, as it is the averagely more socially adept females who will tend to adopt it through repeated experience. The strategy itself however, as a program of behavior, remains genderless.

* Therefore, a male, adopting a strategy/behavioral pattern, the success of which has been previously associated, however exclusively, with the female, does not in reality, become in any way feminized.

* Therefore, a female, adopting a strategy/behavioral pattern, the success of which has been previously associated, however exclusively, with the male, does not in reality, become in any way more masculine.

* The idea that the current social/technological conditions favour the adoption of strategies dependent for their success on skills of traditionally associated with, but not exclusive to, femininity, somehow 'feminizes' the male, is simply a deception of shoddy phrasing.

Let us have an example. Let's make it reasonably modern.

Aim. Get some food (from the supermarket).

Options:

Strategy: Walk to the supermarket.

A man can walk. A woman can walk. Walking is a genderless strategy. Both sexes walk at a pace governed by their physical fitness, and the sensibleness of their foot and leg-wear. Spike-heels will slow you down. As will enormous great biker-boots. But walking is physical. So should we call walking a 'Masculine' strategy perhaps..? Perhaps not.

Strategy: Persuade someone else to get it for you.

Here, let's differentiate wildly.

Sub-strategy: Sexual wiles. Bat your eyes at the nearest person, and say "Look - if you go get me some food, I may consider sleeping with you..."

Sub-strategy: Threat. Bunch your fists at the nearest person and say "Look - if you don't go and get me some food, I'll find you, and beat you to a pulp."

There are variables external to the individual (the size and strength of the other, the attractiveness and sexual orientation of the other), but still, obviously, these are two sub-strategies that have clear associations with the sexes. And the outcome on average is likely to be biased according to the sex of the individual.

But, and it's a big but, both can be attempted by either sex. The actual strategy is not limited to a specific sex. The actual strategy is genderless.

If it's a female wreastler with a bad temper doing the threatening, the strategy has a fair likelyhood of succeeding.

If it's a member of the latest rave boy-band doing the batting, the strategy has a fair likelyhood of succeeding.

So, in summation, given a set of strategies, wether these strategies are social and group-orientated, or individualistic and agressive in nature, undertakable toward a subjectively desired goal, an individual choosing to adopt such, or indeed 'forced' by the current social climate into adopting such, does not diminish or exaggerate their gender.

Men remain men. Women remain women.

Men and women, to succeed, adapt.

Humans adapt.

So, where are we..? At least in my mind, I am sufficiently convinced that our modern-man is not in reality literally feminized (except possibly by all the waste oestrogen floating around in the water-table) by the Western social morés we have today.

This however does leave me with a quandry... If the {forced} adoption of social strategies more usually associated with the female of the species is not to blame... Why is modern man such a confused gibbering heap..?

Allow me to present:

Why Modern Man is such a Hopeless Fucking Dope.

Please allow me a little room for inane generalizations. If it's any help, I am a man, and therefore do have some clue about it.

Man. Man in general is a simple creature. He likes things to be ordered. he likes his catagories, heirarchies and pecking orders, to be relatively inflexible, or at least, predictively flexible. He likes answers, more than questions. He likes the things he has fixed, to stay fixed. He likes procedure, lists of things to be done, and ticks next to each of these stages, signifying that these things have been completed. He likes to have concrete truths, to build on. Things to take for granted. Loose ends niggle and jiggle in his brain and drive him crazy.

Well, at least, they do me.

The trouble with being a man in these modern times, is that no-one tells you when it happens:

"Hey you..! - Yes you boy, you're a man now. Congratulations, here's a badge and can you sign here please...?"

Doesn't happen. At least not in the West. The West has systematically disposed of, derrided, called into question, erroded or otherwise rendered indefinitive every ritual, every rite of passage, every way for a 'man' to become, without an jot of self-doubt or question in his heart, a MAN.

Let's look at how it used to be done.

Biological. - The hairs on your balls. I can't remember exactly, but I think I got my growth-spurt around 13-14, and a set of hairy jiggly bits a little later. My voice went up and down, and finally settled into a distinctly male bass. (Smoking helps with this one kids. )

ie: mid-teens, with the process drawing to its close round about the greatly heralded 18 years of age. All fine and dandy. "I'm 18, I can vote, I've got hairy balls - I'm a man..."

However these days, with the advent of nutritional awareness concerning childrens' diets, a myriad of supplements, children are going through adolescence to become fully sexually mature at increasingly earlier ages. I think the record for child-pregnancy is 9 in the UK. At a guess, I'd say that puts male adolescence around what..? 10..? 11..? 12..?

"Hmm - I've got hairy balls, but I still like cartoons and only just stopped believing in Santa-Claus. Am I... Am I a man..?"

Virginity. - The whole sex thing. To cut a long and hopefully obvious story short, virginity in the west used to be a thing that was assumed to be the normal condition for the majority the young - and, as such, being a virgin carried less stigma than it does today. In the UK, though something not exactly bandied about casually, retaining your virginity into your mid-to-late teens was nothing particularly shaming. The average 'deflowerment' age for the male was again, roughly in line with the age of consent, and the institutional age of adulcy.

ie: back in the day:

" 'Ere, Phil-mate, I ONLY FUCKIN' DID IT LAST NIGHT DIDN'T I..!!!" Slap back, shake hand - Welcome to the world of men.

But these days, well shit, if you didn't lose it at 12, preferably to your 22 year old baby-sitter and her friend at the same time... You're nothing.

Hence you hide it. You brazen it out. "Yeah, course I dun it 'aven't I - d'yer fink amma a puff or summin'..?" says one 13 year old boy to another.

But then, having lied for so long, whenever he finally does 'lose it' he finds there is no-one to tell. He can't tell the girl he's with, because well, being a slapper*, she might get off with his best friend next week, and tell him. He can't tell his mates, because they'll look puzzled, and say "But Terry, I thought you said you lost it to that Russian chick on holiday when you were 12..?" So he finds he has to hide it again. What should be celebrated as a rite of passage, becomes a guilty little secret. Something to be ashamed of. 'Jeeze - I didn't shag a bird until I was 17 for fuck's sake - what kind of man am I..?'

*because nice girls still don't put out, at least in the teenie mindset - ergo, she must be.

[Note: In Turkey it is uncommon, but not unknown, for a father to hire a prostitute for his son when that son reaches the age of consent. Also, an even less common, but again, not completely discontinued, tradition was the hire a "practice bride" for a month before the real wedding... To get the groom 'used' to married life. Not sex particularly, but how to treat a wife, what to expect her to do, and not do etc. ]

Circumcision, and other trails of the knife: In many cultures, wether dubbed by the West as primitive or not, there still exist rituals and rites of manhood. All manner of scarrings, tattooings, tooth-chippings, piercings, hangings, impalings etc. In Turkey it is circumcision. "No big deal" you say, admiring your tanned bell-end, and that is exactly the problem, in the West, it is no big deal.

But in Turkey, it is a very big deal indeed. Second only to marriage. The kid, between the ages of 7 to 10, gets decked out like a walking Christmas tree, and paraded round the town village or city in an open-topped car, or on a horse, or in the East, a camel. Finally outside the house, in the street, the men (and the boy) dance the Harmandela, the dance of men, which the child has been practicing for weeks, and money is pinned onto his robes. Sometimes quite a lot of money.

Then, in a specially-decorated room in the house, on a bed covered in white silk, all the women are ushered out, and the men of the family, the local Imam, and the Sünnetci (qualified for the chopping) gets down to business. A local anaesthetic may or may not be applied, and then... snip. The boy struggles not to cry. The boy's father lifts him up and proclaims to heaven his son is a man. The Imam sanctifies events and seals the ritual.

Boy becomes man. Or at least puts one foot firmly and irrevocably on the road to manhood.

In the West - Little boys compare cocks in the urinals... "Hey, where's your hoody thing..?" "Hoody thing..? Fuck knows - I've never had one."

Clothes: "Clothes maketh the man" they used to say before it became both socially and fashionably unfashionable. Remember little boys and short trousers..? Probably not. I felt pretty damn grown up when I first wore my long-trousers to school somewhere around 12. And my first suit..? Oh-yeah. I'm a man now. Okay - I'm kidding a little. But the fact remains that these days there is no real distinction in dress between young and old, boy and man. Jeans and a Tee-Shirt, de-riguer. Everybody dresses young, everyone, for some reason, dresses poor.

Work: Man goes to work. Your first job used to be a swinging away from your childhood, and a sudden immersion into the hard and sweaty world of manhood. Grim-faced, ham-fisted men lifting heavy shit around, patrician figures scratching marks on ledgers and weighing out other men's fortunes in their gnarled hands. Nowadays, well, you're usually sitting next to Vera, who's not only better than you at the computer-bashing business, but has probably been set to train you up to standard.

From: "Arrr - We'll be 'avin no slackers 'round 'ere boy, lift till yer break yer spine..!"

To: "Hello deary, you couldn't make us a cuppa could you poppet..?"

Nuff said.

Trial by Combat: My Dad had WWII, my Grandad had WWI. War - a sure-fire, never-miss, "become a man or die like a dog" scenario.

Being in a situation of heart stopping terror for a 'just' cause, with a weapon in your hands, someone else's blood on your jacket, and compatriots' lives depending on you will go a long way toward burying the child and exhaulting the man. Wether we like it or not, killing an enemy of the tribe in reasonably fair or at least universally sanctioned combat has always been a signifier of passage into manhood.

Call me black and white, but WWII was the last completely 'morally' justifiable war, with a clear, overpowering, and thoroughly 'evil' opponent.

Vietnam. Yah. The Falklands. Hmm. The Gulf. Kinda. The Gulf II. Oil.

Yes-yes, not as simple as that I know. But essentially still not exactly conflicts in which you can put your hands on your hearts and say were completely snow-white in motive. A WWII veteran's conscience sleeps more easily than that of a Desert Stormer.

Anyway, you could say I suppose that a dangerous occupation goes some way toward providing a substitute for trial by combat - for example: Policeman. Dangerous yes, but no-one likes policemen. Fireman. Manhood at the price of getting burned to death is not all boys' (or their mothers') cup of tea. Lots of jobs have elements of danger yes, but no universal and compulsary trail-by-combat avenue is existant in modern society. Beyond a fight or two at school.

To recap before moving toward a conclusion: -

The current level of social/technological (I don't think you can really separate the two) development has rendered largely useless the traditionally masculine, purely physical/aggression-based strategies of social behavior, closing the male/female divide. And putting the male at a slight, but not irrecoverable disadvantage, as he has to firstly 'unlearn' or repress the redundant tactics of refined aggression aquired in adolescence, and secondly, catch up to the female in the tactics of socio/sexual manipulation.

Now, add to this handicap the observation that the traditional social markers of manhood have been dissolved, and that the biological change into adulcy now comes so early that it is out of sync. with the psychological change from boy into adolescent/adult and you get a horrible mess.

"Am I a man..? Or a boy in a business-suit..?" Something echoed in modern fiction - not constantly perhaps, but certainly often enough.

(I have not presumed to understand the processes of womanhood. I will only say that I believe girls suffer a simular nebulousness regarding their psychological status as woman).

ie: The errosion of traditional gender roles is an ongoing subtext in the societies of the US, the UK, and Western Europe - And if I was going to blame anyone or anything, I'd blame economics, and its henchman - the mass media.

In times of conflict and uncertainty, (capitalist) economic forces emphasize the production of materiél for consumption external to the host society, rather than within. ie. Weapons/supplies. To promote this end it uses the available media to encourage society to 'tighten its belts' - to ignore current (group) hardships for the long-term goal of social re-stabillization, and peace.

However, after a prolonged period of peace, this equation reverses. The Capitalist system, to preserve 'growth' begins to emphasize production for internal consumption by the host society. And again, to promote this, it uses available media to encourage society to 'loosen its belts', to focus on current percieved (individual) hardships, to ignore long-term goals, for short-term satisfactions.

Note: I'm not anthromorphosizing the capitalist system. This process is not a minded thing. It's just a whole bunch of separte people and organizations refining and tweaking the parts of a whole that they cannot see, or at least it does not profit them to see.

This process of manipulating society into a mind-set favourable to consumption is far-reaching and pervasive. A few extrapolations:

- Communal activities are unfavourable to consumption. From a capitalist POV, it is better for everyone to have one of everything, than to share one big one. Think cinema/home cinema. To achieve this state, it becomes necessary to discourage people from going out. Think about the general climate of fear in the USA, and to an extent in the UK too. Is it real..? Or exaggerated..? (However it is just as important for its perpetuity that this fear is not one that can be faced, and overcome. Hence these media-promoted fear objects are at once pervasive but not tangible - 'terror' what does that actually mean..? Where is it..?)

- Selfishness is to be promoted. Do it yourself, don't do it free-gratis for others. Let them buy the things they need to help themselves, themselves.

- Separation of communities into individuals. The conversion of houses into castles, to keep the (imaginary) enemies outside the gates. Locks, alarms, guns, CCTV, security agencies, insurance... All lucrative trades.

- Epicurianism, the easiest way to control a person is to control the availability of his or her vices. And civil control is always a factor in the governance of a peacetime society, without an definitive enemy outside, the herd may begin to see the horns of those in power... To this end, more pastimes for play must be created, more gadgets, more addictions. "Work hard. Play hard my children." A stoic is hard to control because he or she affords the would be controller little leverage in terms of material possessions.

I could go on, but you're smart people, you can see other ramifications for yourselves. Basically - Conflict economy requires unity of society, Peacetime economy, separation.

But - perhaps to the question of gender roles in society the most important is...

- Unisexuality. From a captalist POV it is better to be able sell all products, perhaps in different packaging, to both sexes, for the widest possible market. And since the greatest difference between the sexes is physical, this is the difference that needs to be adressed. Hence the current bodytype trends for the male, well groomed, hairless, thoroughly moisturized, young-looking.

To cut a long story short, and because my wife wants to use the computer (damn this equal society!!!), the thrust of media, to promote consumption is to manipulate psychologically both men and women into a prolonged juvenile state.

Being old is bad. Looking old is worse.

Don't listen to the old. They know nothing of value .

Enough is okay. More than enough is better.

Don't plan ahead. You have credit. You deserve it now.

Your own needs are prime. Screw the common good.

Don't share. Be selfish. You worked hard for it. Why should you..?

Mine. Mine. Mine. Me. Me. Me.

All fine childish traits.

Anyone opening a fashion magazine will note the hairless 'juvenile' male phenotype is favoured now. Perhaps they will also note that the current female phenotype favoured is also juvenile: tall (ie. of a height roughly equal to average male - reminiscent of pre-adolescence), willowy - without the pronounced voluptuousness of a mature female - a tom-boy.

In conclusion - It is my main assertion that Western man, and Western Woman, rather than being feminized, or indeed masculinized by the current social climate, are simply suspended in a state of psychological neoteny.

Their bodies change just as they have always done, if at an accelerated rate, into the adult form, their minds however, do not. They cannot.

They remain juvenile.

Neither sex has an external reference point with which to objectively judge their maturity. No rites of passage. A fall-back to juvenile behavior is without stigma in society, because no-one can tell the difference anymore.

Social/technical level renders the male and female equal again, just as they were in childhood.

Media, driven by capitalist market forces, actively promotes a juvenile, selfish/consumptive mind-set, and indirectly lobbies against stoic maturity.

As Nietzche opined - "That which does not kill you makes you stronger." ie: development through hardship. This is nothing new - The tarot card 'Death' is not actually a bad card (the 9, or 10 of swords, is much worse).

To the tarot - death equates with change. With growth. The death of the child and of childish things and the emergence of the adult form.

Where, in peacetime, in a welfare society, is death..? Where in the time of medical technology and insurance, is true pain..? Where in the time of psychotherapy and faked talk-show chest-beating, is anguish..?

Humans have succeeded too well. In removing pain and death and loss and anguish from everyday life, we have also removed the footholds we used to use to pull ourselves up from childhood into maturity.

The consequences of our actions or inactions are no longer, at least in the overwhelming majority, lethal/life-threatening.

Look at interactions on internet forums if you wish an extreme example. In this medium, no injury can result from an individual's actions: The result, juvenile squabbling, name-calling, pettiness, and a degree of insult that in the real world, would carry the danger of grevious bodily harm being inflicted.

Juvenilia.

The nanny-state intercedes to save us from sloth with welfare. It pre-empts and forbids acts that carry high failure rates - except in the format of 'extreme sports' which are marketable - and generally attempts to suck life free of all risk/danger. It pre-masticates our available experiences into baby-food.

Stoicism is at an all time low. We are all happy little epicurean children playing with our toys within the enfolding arms/walls of society. Unable to leave, unwilling to grow.

Boy looks like man, but is not.

Girl looks like woman, but is not.

Modern Man is not feminized, but juvenile.

Modern Woman is not masculinized, but juvenile.

Now... Who's for milk and cookies..?

...Continued...

As Below, So above.

Back in the eighties, when I was young, and dumb, and dressed in black, not to mention still a virgin, I studied the occult - mainly with the extremely optimistic aim of majicking some poor cow's undies down.

Needless to say, though I learned the tetragrammaton, and all the sephiroth, and all the meanings of the Aleister Crowley tarot deck, it didn't work. Then I discovered that five pints of lager and a good song and dance in a night club worked much better. And I forgot all the esoteric knowledge of the Golden dawn. Save for one thing:

As above, so below.

The ultimate alchemical soundbyte.

This has haunted me all through my life, not so much as it stands, but in its reversal:

As below, so above.

And it is this that is the theme of what I write now. This idea that however far something goes, it retains something of what has gone before, something of what underlies it. And so we turn to evolution.

However, before I try to extend the ideas of this essay, or simply give them a more detailed foundation, I'd like to recap very quickly the core assumptions, and give some definitions of the context in which I use certain phrases.

* The sex-drive is the foremost of human drives, effecting almost all forms of behaviour.
* This drive cannot be ignored, it must be expressed, but the way in which it is expressed has a social component, and to a lesser extent, a conscious component.
* There is no innate (DNA encoded) knowledge on the part of the conscious individual that sex leads to offspring. The two are essentially separate concepts.
* Sexual behaviour, being a 'given', necessarily lacks an intrinsic moral component, however, it automatically aquires one in humans contextualized by an equal 'given' - Concurrent social conditions.
* From a social evolutionary POV. the selective force for human behaviour is one of social cohesion.
* From a social evolutionary POV. the unit of inheritance is a particular behaviour, or a 'suite' of complementary behaviours.
* Not all of the factors affecting behaviour are products of conscious choice, some are the effects of an assimilted, 'true' genetic, or epigenetic nature.

Definitions:

* Cohesion: I use cohesion in the sense of the social bonds between members of a group of individuals. An increase in group cohesion raises the likelyhood of harmonious cooperation between any two or more individuals of that group. It also increases the maximum group size. A decrease in cohesion raises the likelyhood of exploitative, selfish, encounters between individuals or outright agressive conflict. It also decreases the maximum group size, and increases factionism and schism.
* Social evolution: The changes over time, of a given society
* Behaviour: An action, or chosen inaction, of an individual, or group.
* Selective force: Something which acts to remove, or cause to proliferate a given unit of evolution. In the case of this discussion - behaviour.
* Unit of [social] inheritance: behaviour which is passed down generations via passive imitation, spoken, demonstrative or written means.
* A 'given': Something unavoidable, a constant factor, a consequence of being. For example, that a cube has six faces is a given.


Everyone knows about Darwin and DNA, and gradual tiny changes over time turning fish into frogs and monkeys into men - but there is more to it than that.

Epigenetics. Methods of transmitting chemical and structural information both down the generations and crosswise across them, methods that do not involve DNA. There are (so far discovered) four types:

*Self-sustaining loops - basically auto-catalyic networks of selective genomic expression.
*Structural templating - creating and stabilizing different cell types, and prionic lineages.
*RNA mediated interferrence - the reactive siliencing of selected genes.
*Chromatin marks - a highlighter pen for genetic code.

Going into the nitty-gritty of each would take a book. I suggest you read "Evolution in Four Dimensions" if you're interested, and simply believe me, however temporarily, if you aren't.

The important point to remember is that epigenetic inheritance systems are an evolutionary halfway house. If or when enviromental conditions change, and stress a lifeform living under them, it is the more flexible (and reversable) epigenetic inheritance systems which react to modify the lifeform's molecular biology to compensate first.

If the changes in the enviroment beocome the new norm, these epigenetic variations gradually are assimilated into true genetic inheritance systems - and become permanent features of the creatures genome. If the enviromental conditions change again, or change back to the way they were, the epigenetic systems shift again to compensate or revert back to 'normal', without the long and drawn out process of classic Darwinist genetics.

Simply put, epigenetic systems 'interpret' the genome of a given species to better suit the world in which any particular generation or generations of that species lives.

Think of an orchestra. Say they have no conducter, but have become very good at playing the same bit of music, in exactly the same way every time. One day they become famous, and are asked to tour the world. It is a disaster. It is a disaster exactly because they play the same bit of music the same way every time. Because what sounded sublime with the acoustics of the auditorium in which they used to play, sounds only so-so, and sometimes downright horrendous, with the acoustics of another auditorium.

And so they hire a conducter, who among other things fine-tunes their arrangements to suit each new venue, and sometimes teaches them to let go, and extemporize on the musical themes they always play.

The conducter is of course, the epigenetic inheritance systems.

Enough of the DNA already.

Now let's talk about behaviour. We all (hopefully) know about 'enviromental niches' - small sets of enviromental conditions and resource availability - that different creatures occupy and exploit. Over time the creatures evolve genetically to perfect a phenotype to fit the niche they find themselves in better. But sometimes life gets hectic, and things move fast, too fast for even epigenetic adaptaion to cope, let alone clunky old DNA.

The easiest example is given by a common creature - a rabbit, or protorabbit if you like. Let's call him, for tradition's sake, Bugs.

Now Bugs used to live in the forest up a tree, until he got booted out for being a fucking smartarse. He left his nice comfortable niche, and headed for the open grassland. Unfortunately a lot of his mates who came with him got scoffed by the eagles who patroled the skies above. But Bugs was smart, and whenever he felt afraid, squatted in any nearby hollow in the ground, until the eagles passed. His kids and some of his comrades saw him, and started to do the same. As he aged, Bugs even started to improvise when hollows were in short supply, and began to scrape one out new ones if none could be found. Then he began to dig holes to store his carrots and hide his Misses when she was preggers, and the kids grew up feeling very at home in holes, and learnt quickly how to dig them.

And so, Bugs found he could survive where no protorabbits had ever survived before. He carved a new niche through behaviour, where none had existed.

Then of course, genetics kicked in, and he grew thick claws for digging, and big stupid teeth for gnawing. The rest is history.

When times are hard, behaviour can bridge the gap until traditional evolutionary mechanisms catch up.

I want you to imagine a hand. Your hand perhaps. I want you to imagine you are climbing. You reach up to find a hold, and your fingers brush the lip of a protrusion above. You feel around a little, settling your fingers more firmly, then finally lock on and pull up with your full strength.

You have done three things - the reaching up, and the finding of a hold - that is behavioural adaptation. The settling of your fingers into that hold - that is epigenetic adaptation. The full strength final lock on - that is classic genetic adaptation.

Of course, your hold may slip, at which point you first feel for another. You first alter your behaviour. You don't sit there, dangling above an abyss by one finger, waiting for your hand to evolve into a piton.

Well, you could, but you'd die.

But we are forgetting something. How did you ever learn to climb in the first place..?

That's right, you remember now, your Dad taught you, and when he'd taught you everything he knew, you went to the library and bought a book on the subject of knots and rope and climb-routes for the most difficult of mountains.

And this is the final method of transmitting information across generations - one available pretty much only to Humans, because Bugs can't speak much, and never learned to read or write. Symbolic inheritance. NOT MEMES btw. MEMES ARE BULLSHIT. DID I SAY "NOT MEMES"..? I did..? Good. Symbolic inheritance is not memetic, because memes do not exist.

I'll tell you the difference if you like, but you'll have to ask me.

Moving on.

So what has all this got to do with "As below, so above" ..?

Aha.

I want to draw a few parallels between the essentially separate systems of internal Genetic and epigenetic adaptation, and the external adaptive systems of behaviour and symbols.

Very roughly, the DNA in the genome of a species is a compilation of everything that has been proven to have worked for a species living in a certain place, under certain conditions for a long, long time. This information is rigorously conserved and gets copied faithfully down through each successive generation, changing very, very little. This genome produces bodies, vehicles of specific types - phenotypes - which differ from the physiologies of other competing species.

The epigenetic systems constantly fluctuate, leaning first one way then the other, following the fashions set by the conditions of the day. If a particular day turns out to be very long indeed, then the alterations made to the expression of the DNA genome by the epigenetic systems tend, over time, to become effectively embedded into the genetic dogma of DNA.

Hold that passage in your mind. I will write another now, similar to it.

Very roughly, the bedrock culture of any particular race of men is a compilation of everything that has been proven to have worked for a group of people living in a certain place, under certain conditions for a long, long time. This cultural heritage is rigorously conserved and gets passed down faithfully through each successive generation, changing very, very little. This culture produces a people who believe in a set of values which alters their behaviour in contrast with the peoples of other competing cultures.

The symbolic systems of contemporary media constantly fluctuate, creating beliefs and behaviours that lean first one way then the other, following the fashions set by the conditions of the day. If a particular day turns out to be very long indeed, then the temporary alterations made to the beliefs and values of the central cultural dogma of that society, over time, become a permanent part of it.
As below, so above.

...Continued...

Units of Inheritance.

The classic selfish gene of Dawkin's fame I think, is defunct. As a focus for inheritance it is too small, too narrow. The are of course examples of phenotypic expression that rely on single genes but they are by far in the minority. Genetisists were most puzzled when they conducted experiments that 'knocked out' certain genes, preventing them from expressing, to scrutinize the effects and so ascertain their function. They found out that a lot of the time, nothing happened at all. The body kept on trucking without any major lapses in biochemical function.

Something compensated for these artificially imposed abscences.

If you've ever studied models of internet pathways you get a monstrously bushy, hyper-connected network, something like this, but on a much more massive scale:



The American military pioneered reseach into the robustness of distributed networks - knocking out specific nodes - to see how much loss a network can sustain of physical hardware, before such a network ceases to be of use as a vehicle for communication. The answers they got is that networks are amazingly robust - there of course remain specific nodes that always carry more traffic, are more vital for overall function - but on the whole, a network can sustain massive damage without major impairment of function. There is a critical threshold, which once crossed causes a sudden massive failure, but prior to that functionality remains almost negligibly effected.


The above is an illustration of a "Waddington epigenetic landscape" the nodes below the upper sheet are single genes. The upper sheet itself corresponds to the phenotypic expression - the bodytype - associated with the genes in the network below. You've been to the circus - remember the big-top..? Imagine such a tent but with millions of different interwoven guy-ropes beneath, giving the big-top its distinctive shape, not through singular efforts on the part of any particular gene or rope-stay - but through the whole network of interactions, each new rope, each new connection altering the tension in all the others.

I would offer a new unit of inheritance, a less physical one, a more emergent consequence of evolution improving the robustness of its genotype-phenotype linkages - the network.

...Continued...

The Extended Phenotype.

Notes on Dawkin's "Extended Phenotype"

Prior to chapter eleven the book is mainly concerned with butressing the theories expoused in "The Selfish Gene".

Pg.197/8: A genetisist need not care about the exact pathway between gene and phenotypic effect, simply on the difference between alleles and their effects on end products/outcomes - because 'natural' selection is applied in exactly the same way - taking the existence of a pathway, one even routing through several bodies, for granted.

Say a fish builds a little 'house' out of stones on the river bed. The colour of the stones chosen is dependent on a single allele. Change that, chage the hue of the house. How exactly is that mechanism any different from a gene that governs the colour of skin or hair..? save in extention..?

Same with spider webs. A larger mouth at less energetic cost. Beaver dams, and the lake they form, and the ecology that lake promotes, should be thought of as extentions of the beaver phenotype, as surely as if that lake were enclosed inside their skins.

Note: Convergent evolution // behavioral mimicry of optimal physiology.

A three-jointed human arm has only seven degrees of freedom, which are defined as the types of movements each joint can perform. Your shoulder and wrist each have three degrees of freedoms—each can tilt up and down, turn left and right, and can roll in a circular motion. Your elbow, however, only has one degree of freedom, which is tilting up and down.

Scientists consider each of an octopus' eight arms to possess a virtually infinite number of degrees of freedom, allowing them to bend and twist freely. But when it's time to eat, octopuses use their flexible muscles to form temporary, quasi-articulated joints that work similar to how human joints function.

Researchers recorded muscle activity in octopus limbs, and found that an arm generates two waves of muscle contractions that propagate toward each other. When the waves collide, they form a part-time joint.

This process occurs three times, forming a shoulder where the arm meets the body, a wrist where the suckers have grasped their food, and an "elbow" somewhere in between. The elbow typically exhibits the most movement during food retrieval.

The researchers say this is a remarkably simple and apparently optimal mechanism for adjusting the length of arm segments according to where the food item is grasped along the arm.

The similarity of structural features and control strategies between jointed vertebrate arms and flexible octopus limbs suggests that these configurations evolved separately in octopuses and vertebrates, a result scientists call an example of convergent evolution.

...Continued...

Thirteen ways to fall.

Falling she says. I’m falling.
And in turn I run.
Down the stairs and out the door
Slippers slip-slapping
Shirt-tails flip-flapping.
Crows feet at my eyes and arms outspread.
Like wings.
Heartflutter, mouthsplutter
Invective without directive.
Blood charging through my face.
I’m falling I say.
And sure enough -
I hit the ground full tilt like the world
turned 90 degrees in an instant.

Fallen. Felled. I feel battered, tattered
Beaten, cream-crackered. Harsh breathing.
Focus. There are feet at my face.
Fluffy pink slippers.
You fell she said.
Ouch. I said. You’re observant.
fucker she said.

Banana skin girl big cheesy grin.
All food and sustenance, mead and maul
Big blooming cheeks florid forlorn
Why ? she says.
You fell I said. That’s cheating.
Not the deal we dealt ourselves.

Addressed from on high
Stooden up, dressed down; 
dusted off, turned around.
Sick of being prepositioned,
Conjugated to death
I’m dragged like Peter’s shadow
restitched by Wendy,
flat on my black,
back home.
Where the heart isn’t
(Wasn’t/hasn’t been).
Tense. Nervous. Headache.
She triple locks the doors and windows
Plugs up the plugholes and bricks up the flue.
My father christmas days are over she tells me.

Black swan

Notes on the Black Swan by Nassim N. Taleb:

Pg.36. Non-scalable and Scalable situations. ie: Mediocristan/guassian vs. Extremistan/Mandelbrot

Comparing situations in which the average value is largely unaffected by the addition of a new individual value (physically contrained sets like height or weight, or systems where something is constructed from scratch in each transaction) with situations that are unconstrained - such as personal wealth, or booksales - where there tend to be either absolute losers with zero sales or insignificant property, and true giants like Harry Potter or Bill gates - where the addition of a single extra individual (a black swan) can totally upset the previous average value.

Pg 40: The Turkey lesson about corroborative past - 1000 days of feeding, and on the 1001st day, a twisted neck.

Pg 54: The error of confirmation: "No evidence of X" is not the same as "Evidence of no X"

Pg 59: Switching things round:
"There are no black swans." -->
"All swans are white" ==>
"Anything not white cannot be a swan"

According to (faulty) confirmative logic, that which confirms the second - the sighting of a red mini for example, also confirms the former, that all swans are white.

Pg 68: Cost benefit + information:

*Information is costly to obtain, costly to store and costly to manipulate and retrieve.

To reduce these costs we use patterns and rules to compress/reduce the amount of information needed to re-create the object/event/uncompressed information

However - in so summarizing - we also add more 'order' to the world as we percieve it than there really is - and hence are prone to underestimating the degree of randominity extant in the real world.

Pg. 71 - this error of derived rules - the narrative falacy (drawing of 'story'-like conections between things perhaps not truly connected) and the ludic falacy (using a simulation or 'game'like abstract representation of a real-life situation to draw conclusions, predictions and rules concerning that real life situation - and placing too much faith in them) also effects memory - creating a palimpsest - as you remember not the actual event first recorded, but your memory of remembering of that event, and then the memory of the memory of remembering that event. Like a photocopy of a photocopy, sometimes the details get fuzzy, and sometimes parts of that attendent fuzz get interpreted as something else entirely.

Pg. 76: Narrative fallacy:

"Joey seemed happily married. He killed his wife."
"Joey seemed happily married. He killed his wife to get her inheritence."

The second intuitively seems more likely, though it is in fact not.

Pg. 80: The power of emotional connection - "One death is a tragedy - a million is a statistic." Stalin. That which cannot be easily and vividly imagined, effects us but slightly.

Pg 100: The problem of silent evidence, and the self-sampling assumption. ie: of course all gamblers have beginner's luck - otherwise they wouldn't have become gamblers. Those that prayed but drowned anyway, did not survive to tell the story of how their praying saved their lives.

Pg.107: That which does not kill you makes you weaker. The idea that people are somehow hardened through sub-lethal physical hardship and adversity - which 'weeds out' the weak from the strong - is fallicious because it neglects to state that the surviving 'strong' are also weakened by their trial. The progeny of those so selected perhaps, but again how much strength is derived from nurture, and how much from nurture. How much genetic, how much epigenetic..?

Pg 112: Visable effect. "Look at what I did for you." is more easily marketed than "Look at what I avoided for you." ie: A catastrophe visibly combatted is much more media-friendly than a catastrophe so well prevented that even its threat never broke the surface tension of public perception. (eg. the politician who has saved the most lives is actually the man who exposed the safety records of car manufacturers and made seatbelts maditory, but who even knows his name..?)

Pg. 139: People's evaluations of [the certainty of] their own knowledge is frequently exaggerated. Usually by a factor of twenty. A 2% estimate of error in some area of knowledge is in reality around 40 - 45%. A better education usually increases the error margin, rather than closes it. ie: a graduate is only slightly more knowledgable than X, but is many times more confident in that knowledge.

Pg. 146: Experts and and empty suits: Techné = craft. [know-how] Epistémé = knowledge. [know-what] Imagine you will have an operation - do you want 'know-how' in the form of a surgeon..? Or 'Know-what' in the form of a popular science writer..?

Expert professions: livestock judges, astronomers, test pilots, chess masters, physicists, accountants, pure mathematicians, insurance analysts (as long as dealing with constrained "mediocristan" subjects). The subject matter does not 'move' - chess is chess today, and chess tomorrow, the mechanics of flying does not radically change from day to day, today's cow is tomorrow's cow. ie: the black swan liability is low.

Non-Experts 'professions': stockbrokers, pyschiatrists, psychologists, court judges, councilors, intelligence analysts, financial advisors. High variability linked with overconfident evaluations and high margins of error... Empty suits and empty words, however convincing they may be.

Pg. 151 & 153: Accuracy of prediction. Study reveals that a PHD makes no difference in accuracy. However - a big reputation makes people worse at prediction than those who have none. Famous people also make bad predictors.

Pg. 159: Points of reference: A subconscious tendency to use (random) numbers as seed crystals around which to build belief. A study showed that people shown a (random) number were influenced by it in later tasks involved in estimation - a high number produced higher estimations than a lower number for example.

People find it almost impossible to evaluate something in isolation without some [arbitrary] point to work from.

cf: James No2's lack of absolute originality - everything is related to past matters. What goes before sets the stage for what comes after.

Pg. 171/2/3: Limitations on forecasting essentially historical events - Soft historical studies/social science - are too based in the narrative fallacy to be dependable as anything but fiction. Popper.

"Fundamentally unpredictable" to know the future is to make the future into the present. To correctly predict the future you must also predict accurately the technology of the future. If you can do that, then simply by idea difusion, you will probably be able to create the technology of the future today.

The law of iterated expectations - "If I expect to expect something at a later date, then I already expect that something in the present."

Predictions of the future are really merely re-runs of today and yesterday, perhaps with a few extra bells and whistles. ie: predict tomorrow with reasonable certainty, but not next week.

Pg. 178: problems with prediction from incomplete information. Billiard balls.

Two balls colliding - easy. Three, possible with precise knowledge of initial states... Nine - you need to take into account the gravitational effects of anyone near the table... Fifty-six impacts - you need to exactly know the states of every single elementary particle in the universe.

Billiard balls are easy - they have no personal needs, drivers or desires. predicting collisions between people however...

... And yet that is what social scientists and economists believe they can [reliably/accurately] do. To give themselves a leg to stand on they assume that everyone acts "rationally" (acting toward their best interests in all futures) and "coherrently" (adherring faithfully to habits and predilictions).

The chief fallacy of this is two-fold - it assumes everyone within a given sample has equal knowledge and the ability to put it into practice, and that all habits/predilictions are strongly held.

Given that people frequently make irrational and inconsistant choices - the general theories of economic optimization fail. There can be no "general theory" from which to make [long-range] predictions concerning any topic in which people are a variable - the branching error margins for their decisions/actions become exponential.

Pg. 195: Prediction errors and motivation [aka anticipated utility/affective forecasting]. It is thought a certain degree of prediction bias is innate and serves as a cue toward [beneficial/aversive] action. We overestimate, sometimes drastically, the impact of future events, both good and bad, on our lives. That new car becomes less a vehicle than a key to heaven; that impending redundancy becomes not so much a hiccup but an all consuming tidal wave.

Without such a fanfare and hullabaloo however - would we ever get up off the sofa..?

Pg. 196: Forward is easy, backward is hard. An ice cube is melting. Predicting the shape of the puddle it will make is difficult, but not entirely impossible, if you measure sufficiently well the starting conditions. But now, given a random puddle of water, try to reconstruct exactly what made it...

Helenus, of the iliad (son of priam and hecuba captured and made to tell the acheans how to capture troy) was a seer who predicted backward - seeing the past from its barest remnants.

Pg. 198: The death of determinism. Is everything determined..? Is randomness truly random or deterministic chaos...?

Random has no predictable properties, not even a predictable unpredictability. Chaos however, conceals a predictable order beneath a superficial surface of fake 'random'. It has predictable elements - but they are [very very] hard to know.

It doesn't matter. For any practical purpose, both are the same. Randomness is incomplete information. Opacity. And induction the fallacy of believing facet of life X. is non-random from insufficient observation.

Pg. 205: Barbell strategy in investment - hyper-conservatism and hyper-aggression. Because risk assessments are always error-prone the best way to invest is in the same way as you would gamble so as to invite good fortune and minimize losses. ie, bet big on sure things, but also bet a little at huge odds just on the off-chance. "Medium sized" bets are the worst - they are lauded as 'safe' but for relatively little return in reality risk huge losses should you invest heavily.

ie: two horses: Mr. Racecourse-Rocket and Mr. No-Hoper. MRR always always places in every race he ever enters. Lousy odds, but a big enough bet each way will always pay for your dinner, if maybe not dessert. MNH however wins a race maybe once in a blue moon, (if there's always an eclipse at the same time) at truly stupendous odds (he's the google of racehorses) - put a fiver on him every week, okay, you'll bleed out slow, but if he ever comes in, you can retire.

ie: invest at both ends of the spectrum, at something like 85% / 15% split - but never in the middle.

(This btw. is also why casinos limit single bets to sizes that won't ever bankrupt them - because the combined losses of the many always more than cover the lucky high-rolling few on any given day).

Pg. 216: Sherwin Rosen - the economics of superstars. The differential in earnings between X and Y in extremistan professions - TV celebrity, sports and films etc is increasing. But this does not mean that X is hugely better than Y at their profession, only that these professions instigate a 'tournament' effect - the winner only has to win by even the merest of margins to scoop the whole pot.

Of course, they can also win by pure luck. And once the initial event has occurred, social coherence/adherence effects re-inforce the outcome as people gravitate toward the winner - heaping upon him or her the adulation and material prizes which may indeed make that person win yet again.

ie: two books in the same catagory - horror say - one's a Stephen King, one's a Mr. Nobody. All other things being equal enough people would instinctively buy the former over the latter to make sure that Mr. Nobody stayed Mr. Nobody, however good Mr. Nobody might really be.

Pg. 218/219 Merton's ideas of "preferential attachment" (herding in choices / preferences) and cumulative advantage (the first million is the hardest - success attracts greater successes etc.) leads to Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu noting the link between the globalization of culture and the increased concentration of success. ie - the tournament effect above doesn't really depend on the actual number of players, it still tends to funnel success toward an ever smaller proportion of the population - given that that population is sufficiently well linked together both in comms hardware/software and through shared cultural reference points. MTV say, or concepts of female beauty - Whatever the credo, a punter is still a punter.

In general - the big get bigger, and the small either get smaller or stay the same. ie: We feel - like female birds at a lek - more comfortable with choices that already have been agreed with. (Which also explains the sudden attractiveness you gain from having a girlfriend :) ).

Zipf's law. Linguistics - the idea that the more you use a word, the less effortful it will be to use again. ie: we tend to fish out words from our private lexus with an ease and regularity dependent upon the frequency of their past use. (on the part of the individual and within his/her linguistic enviroment - leading to local dialects appearing quickly if isolated sufficiently)

eg - in English there are roughly 60,000 main words, of which only a few hundred constitute the bulk of written English and even fewer in casual conversation.

Pg. 227: Michael Marmot - Whitehall studies - shows, even adjusting for disease, a higher social status positively effects longevity. eg: an Oscar is worth an extra five years of life to an actor.

People who live in societies with relatively flat social gradients live longer en toto than the populaces of steeply-graded societies. Being a loser kills.

Pg. 233. The Guassian lie: The precipitous fall off slopes of the bell curve - as you move away from the 'norm' - produce probabilities so unfeasibly low that black swans seem completely out of the picture in any sane world. Trouble is, it is massively sensitive to errors in the measurement of sigma (standard deviation) to the point where a very small miscalculation can result in gross (a factor of a trillion for example at 20-21 sigma) underestimation of risks - if a guassian curve is applied to a scaleable situation - such as the stock-market - and used as a reliable predictor of risk... everyone, sooner or later, is totally fucked.

A Mediocristan (guassian) plot has an inconstant (exponential for example) decline as you move away from the centre in either direction, and an extremistan (Mandelbrotian) plot - follows a constant decrease as you move away. Anticipating risks with much greater levels of probability.

The key is to correctly apply the right curve to the right situation, rather than a one-size fits all approach.

Pg. 244: How do you tell where you are..? If you are dealing with yes/no questions, in which magnitudes do not matter or are non-existant (dead/not dead - pregnant/not pregnant - have a something/Don't have a something) then you are in mediocristan. If the magnitude does matter (how much money - how many hits) then you're in extremistan.

Pg. 250: Guassian Assumptions:

One: coin flips have no memory. They are isolate in time and space. You never 'get better' at flipping coins, a head today does not influence the likelihood of another tomorrow.

See - "preferential attachment" and "cumulative advantage" both mean real-world events do not obey Gaussian assumption. Suddenly forty heads in a row becomes more likely than a completely random mix.

Two: Random walks without wild leaps. A Guassian world view has steps of equal (value one) length. The real world has indeterminite step lengths (usually value one) and contains the possibility of a wild leap in times of acute stress.

Pg. 290: Popper. [paraphrase] "Philosophy collapses into empty sophistry without being based around problems that lie outside the strict philosophical domain."

...Continued...