[FRIAM] Friam Digest, Vol 190, Issue 1

Mon Apr 1 16:54:02 EDT 2019

Merle, Jon, 

I have exactly and precisely no idea what you are talking about.

That matters if, and only if: 

There are ideas here that are struggling to reach a wider audience; AND

I represent, in my ignorance, that larger audience. 

Nick 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

 <http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of Merle Lefkoff
Sent: Monday, April 01, 2019 2:22 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Friam Digest, Vol 190, Issue 1

Jon, I don't think anything can be prestatable in the adjacent possible, including what I call the "third space" and you guys call the phase space.  As to the modal realism, maybe.  We begin the journey starting with the "Actual."

On Mon, Apr 1, 2019 at 11:55 AM Jon Zingale <jonzingale at gmail.com <mailto:jonzingale at gmail.com> > wrote:

@Merle

Girls are usually more adjacent than men.

Personally, I would like to hear your voice

more often on this forum.

@Lee

*You're just trying to get a rise out of Nick, right?*

My experience has been that throwing around the `J-word` will often get a rise out of Nick.

Does `getting a rise out of` have type nudge?

Does speaking of adjacent possibles require a specifiable space of possibilities?

More generally, by the mathematical unprestatability 

of the "phase space" (space of possibilities),
no laws of motion can be formulated for evolution.

-- No entailing laws, but enablement in the evolution of the biosphere <https://arxiv.org/pdf/1201.2069.pdf> 

It would appear that in some contexts, describing adjacent possibility as being

dependent upon a  prescribed `phase space ` misses something. Perhaps it is more

desirable to imagine that agents and worlds co-create, and that possibilities emerge

locally in the process.

To these ends, it seems reasonable to me that we can characterize adjacent possibles as

a kind of  modal realism a`la David Lewis. Sure, there are a number of philosophical

objections to be made and Wikipedia will outline a good number of them for interested parties.

Still, my remark was not meant to be meaningless. I do think that such modeling is a potentially

useful technology.

As Dan Piponi outlines, in an inspired moment of blogging, Evaluating Cellular Automata is Comonadic <http://blog.sigfpe.com/2006/12/evaluating-cellular-automata-is.html> .

Unlike classical conceptions of cellular automata, it appears likely that generalizing to the level of

comonad may allow us to escape `pre-stating the phase space` and by it's very nature the associated

co-bind operator develops locally. Sure my previous comment was pithy, but not meant to troll.

On Mon, Apr 1, 2019 at 10:00 AM <friam-request at redfish.com <mailto:friam-request at redfish.com> > wrote:

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When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
than "Re: Contents of Friam digest..."
Today's Topics:

   1. Re: Friam Digest, Vol 189, Issue 40 (lrudolph at meganet.net <mailto:lrudolph at meganet.net> )
   2. Re: Friam Digest, Vol 189, Issue 40 (lrudolph at meganet.net <mailto:lrudolph at meganet.net> )
   3. Re: Friam Digest, Vol 189, Issue 40 (Merle Lefkoff)
   4. new studies confirm existence galaxies almost-no-dark-matter
      (glen)
   5. Re: new studies confirm existence galaxies
      almost-no-dark-matter (Gillian Densmore)
   6. Re: new studies confirm existence galaxies
      almost-no-dark-matter (David Eric Smith)
   7. Re: Friam Digest, Vol 189, Issue 40 (Nick Thompson)
   8. Re:
      15555-10253-closing-a-gap-to-normal-hearing---white-paper.pdf
      (Nick Thompson)
   9. Re: new studies confirm existence galaxies
      almost-no-dark-matter (glen??)
  10. Re: new studies confirm existence galaxies
      almost-no-dark-matter (Eric Smith)
  11. math-induced vs. math-described creativity (was Re:
      TheoremDep) (glen??)
  12. Re:
      15555-10253-closing-a-gap-to-normal-hearing---white-paper.pdf
      (Frank Wimberly)
  13. Re: new studies confirm existence galaxies
      almost-no-dark-matter (lrudolph at meganet.net <mailto:lrudolph at meganet.net> )
  14. Income Equality (Steven A Smith)
  15. Re: new studies confirm existence galaxies
      almost-no-dark-matter (Gillian Densmore)

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: lrudolph at meganet.net <mailto:lrudolph at meganet.net> 
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com> >
Cc: 
Bcc: 
Date: Sun, 31 Mar 2019 15:04:14 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Friam Digest, Vol 189, Issue 40
> Adjacent possibles are neighborhoods in a comonad.

You're just trying to get a rise out of Nick, right?

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: lrudolph at meganet.net <mailto:lrudolph at meganet.net> 
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com> >
Cc: 
Bcc: 
Date: Sun, 31 Mar 2019 15:13:00 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Friam Digest, Vol 189, Issue 40
> An equation that captures the theory of
> the adjacent possible is available.

I have recently been reminded that Quine, in "On What There Is", posed the
question (presumably rhetorical and/or tendentious; my reminder came in
the form of just the following sentence with attribution but no other
context, and I haven't yet been moved to actually look up that context)
"How many possible men are there in that doorway?"  However many there
are, I presume some are more adjacent than others.  Perhaps Quine's
question should be revived to be about possible girls-next-door.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Merle Lefkoff <merlelefkoff at gmail.com <mailto:merlelefkoff at gmail.com> >
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com> >
Cc: 
Bcc: 
Date: Sun, 31 Mar 2019 13:23:42 -0600
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Friam Digest, Vol 189, Issue 40

"girls" are usually more adjacent than men.

On Sun, Mar 31, 2019 at 1:13 PM <lrudolph at meganet.net <mailto:lrudolph at meganet.net> > wrote:

> An equation that captures the theory of
> the adjacent possible is available.

I have recently been reminded that Quine, in "On What There Is", posed the
question (presumably rhetorical and/or tendentious; my reminder came in
the form of just the following sentence with attribution but no other
context, and I haven't yet been moved to actually look up that context)
"How many possible men are there in that doorway?"  However many there
are, I presume some are more adjacent than others.  Perhaps Quine's
question should be revived to be about possible girls-next-door.

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-- 

Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
President, Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org <http://emergentdiplomacy.org> 

Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

merlelefkoff at gmail.com <mailto:merlelefoff at gmail.com> 
mobile:  (303) 859-5609
skype:  merle.lelfkoff2

twitter: @Merle_Lefkoff

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: glen <gepropella at gmail.com <mailto:gepropella at gmail.com> >
To: friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com> 
Cc: 
Bcc: 
Date: Sun, 31 Mar 2019 14:25:14 -0700
Subject: [FRIAM] new studies confirm existence galaxies almost-no-dark-matter
https://news.yale.edu/2019/03/29/new-studies-confirm-existence-galaxies-almost-no-dark-matter

> The finding was highly significant because it showed that dark matter is not always associated with traditional matter on a galactic scale. It also ruled out several theories that said dark matter is not a substance but a manifestation of the laws of gravity on a cosmic scale.
-- 
glen

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Gillian Densmore <gil.densmore at gmail.com <mailto:gil.densmore at gmail.com> >
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com> >
Cc: 
Bcc: 
Date: Sun, 31 Mar 2019 17:24:41 -0600
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] new studies confirm existence galaxies almost-no-dark-matter

So it's possible that what we think of as dark matter could be more to do with a whole lot of magnets/lots and lots and lots of gravity energy and makes things go weird?

Or weirder?

On Sun, Mar 31, 2019 at 3:25 PM glen <gepropella at gmail.com <mailto:gepropella at gmail.com> > wrote:

https://news.yale.edu/2019/03/29/new-studies-confirm-existence-galaxies-almost-no-dark-matter

> The finding was highly significant because it showed that dark matter is not always associated with traditional matter on a galactic scale. It also ruled out several theories that said dark matter is not a substance but a manifestation of the laws of gravity on a cosmic scale.
-- 
glen

============================================================
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---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: David Eric Smith <desmith at santafe.edu <mailto:desmith at santafe.edu> >
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com> >
Cc: 
Bcc: 
Date: Mon, 1 Apr 2019 08:32:01 +0900
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] new studies confirm existence galaxies almost-no-dark-matter
Thank you for this Glen,

This is a really great result, which I had not been following.

Eric

> On Apr 1, 2019, at 6:25 AM, glen <gepropella at gmail.com <mailto:gepropella at gmail.com> > wrote:
> 
> https://news.yale.edu/2019/03/29/new-studies-confirm-existence-galaxies-almost-no-dark-matter
> 
>> The finding was highly significant because it showed that dark matter is not always associated with traditional matter on a galactic scale. It also ruled out several theories that said dark matter is not a substance but a manifestation of the laws of gravity on a cosmic scale.
> -- 
> glen
> 
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
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---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Nick Thompson <nickthompson at earthlink.net <mailto:nickthompson at earthlink.net> >
To: "'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'" <friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com> >
Cc: 
Bcc: 
Date: Sun, 31 Mar 2019 23:20:46 -0600
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Friam Digest, Vol 189, Issue 40

While we are all flinging around jargon and links, am I so wrong to say that “nudges <https://www.amazon.com/Nudge-Improving-Decisions-Health-Happiness/dp/014311526X> ” are a way of moving to the adjacent possible?  

Speakingof the non-adjacent impossible, I woke up the other morning with a fantasy of being in some sort large community meeting, and standing up and asking the question: 

"Why ==>exactly<== is it that everybody shouldn't have the same annual income?"

Nick 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com> ] On Behalf Of lrudolph at meganet.net <mailto:lrudolph at meganet.net> 
Sent: Sunday, March 31, 2019 1:04 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com> >
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Friam Digest, Vol 189, Issue 40

> Adjacent possibles are neighborhoods in a comonad.

You're just trying to get a rise out of Nick, right?

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---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Nick Thompson <nickthompson at earthlink.net <mailto:nickthompson at earthlink.net> >
To: "'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'" <friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com> >
Cc: 
Bcc: 
Date: Mon, 1 Apr 2019 01:04:36 -0600
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] 15555-10253-closing-a-gap-to-normal-hearing---white-paper.pdf

I will have to look at these.  They can’t parse words on first hearing, can they?   Mike knows a little about this area and he has told me some, but I need to know more.  What I think he has told me is that a relatively primitive input with relatively few leads gives a tremendous benefit, much more than one would expect from the complexity of the cochlea itself.  

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

 <http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com> ] On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Sunday, March 31, 2019 12:08 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com> >
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] 15555-10253-closing-a-gap-to-normal-hearing---white-paper.pdf

Except for the young children.  They some and laugh.

-----------------------------------
Frank Wimberly

My memoir:
https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly

My scientific publications:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2

Phone (505) 670-9918

On Sun, Mar 31, 2019, 11:55 AM Frank Wimberly <wimberly3 at gmail.com <mailto:wimberly3 at gmail.com> > wrote:

Nick,

Have you read about cochlear implant surgery?  When I worked at Eye and Ear Hospital of Pittsburgh, the lab I worked in was doing early research in the area.  These are pieces of hardware that transform sound into electrical signals meaningful to the brain.

Have you seen the videos of people who have been deaf since birth who get such a device.  They inevitably sob when they hear sound for the first time.

Frank

-----------------------------------
Frank Wimberly

My memoir:
https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly

My scientific publications:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2

Phone (505) 670-9918

On Sun, Mar 31, 2019, 11:23 AM Nick Thompson <nickthompson at earthlink.net <mailto:nickthompson at earthlink.net> > wrote:

Hi, Everybody, 

In the home congregation, we have had many interesting conversations about hearing in difficult environments, a conversation not only of intense interest to people interested in computer analysis and representation of sounds but also to a bunch of old guys shouting at each other in a crowded college dining area surrounded by hard surfaces.  Recently, we have been trying to assemble our limited knowledge of the cochlea and to grasp the fact that it is not a bank of discrete resonators doing a Fourier Transform, but an innervated sliver of meat with liquid on both sides coiled up in a tiny snail shell.   We are eager for any signs that a hearing aid company has started to reach beyond differential amplification by means of FFT to actually focusing on the cues that really matter for speech comprehension.    

Anyway, …. Anyway….. .  I skimmed through the “white paper” below and thought that, even though it is “captive” research, it had some interesting features.  Consequently, I thought I would pass it around to the list before I lost track of it.  My friend Jon Zingale accuses me of crowd sourcing my reading and that is EXACTLY what I am doing.  So, beware. 

https://wdh.azureedge.net/-/media/oticon-us/main/download-center/white-papers/15555-10253-closing-a-gap-to-normal-hearing---white-paper.pdf?la=en <https://wdh.azureedge.net/-/media/oticon-us/main/download-center/white-papers/15555-10253-closing-a-gap-to-normal-hearing---white-paper.pdf?la=en&rev=0FC7&hash=B7D7D58F75093770CA7E148F72520C1D6BE28CB1> &rev=0FC7&hash=B7D7D58F75093770CA7E148F72520C1D6BE28CB1

If anybody on the list knows of somebody doing advanced research on how the cochlea passes sound on to the brain and how the brain analyses it, we would love to hear from that person.  

And has for you young folks who think this will never happen to you:  have you noticed that your students and young associates and your daughter’s boyfriends MUMBLE.  The moment you find yourself saying, “Curse these millennials, why don’t they speak up like normal people,” you should be taking an interest in hearing technology. 

Just sayin’

N 

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---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "glen∈ℂ" <gepropella at gmail.com <mailto:gepropella at gmail.com> >
To: friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com> 
Cc: 
Bcc: 
Date: Mon, 1 Apr 2019 01:55:55 -0700
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] new studies confirm existence galaxies almost-no-dark-matter
I'm not sure how magnetism plays into all this.  But it is interesting that these are ultra diffuse galaxies.  Maybe there is something wrong with how we extrapolate the rules in flat space to the rules in very bent space, where everything gets so weird.  It seems (to me) that a regular galaxy would be more like a colloidal solution, with lots of little clumps of bent space (heavy things like brown dwarves[†] and such).  Such a pock-marked, bristly, region of space must be more difficult to model than something relatively well-behaved like an ultra diffuse galaxy. Right?  In the vicinity of "almost singularities" (very heavy objects), any measurement or calculation error will have more of an impact on the result.

[†] I forgot to turn off the real-time spell checker on this new-to-me computer and, lo and behold, "dwarves" is not the plural of "dwarf"!  WTF?  https://grammarist.com/usage/dwarfs-dwarves/ tells me it's a neologism popularized by Tolkien.  So, by using it, I'm wearing my Dork on my sleeve.

On 3/31/19 4:24 PM, Gillian Densmore wrote:
> So it's possible that what we think of as dark matter could be more to do
> with a whole lot of magnets/lots and lots and lots of gravity energy and
> makes things go weird?
> Or weirder?
> 
> On Sun, Mar 31, 2019 at 3:25 PM glen <gepropella at gmail.com <mailto:gepropella at gmail.com> > wrote:
> 
>>
>> https://news.yale.edu/2019/03/29/new-studies-confirm-existence-galaxies-almost-no-dark-matter
>>
>>> The finding was highly significant because it showed that dark matter is
>> not always associated with traditional matter on a galactic scale. It also
>> ruled out several theories that said dark matter is not a substance but a
>> manifestation of the laws of gravity on a cosmic scale.
>> --
>> glen

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Eric Smith <desmith at santafe.edu <mailto:desmith at santafe.edu> >
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com> >
Cc: 
Bcc: 
Date: Mon, 1 Apr 2019 18:14:15 +0900
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] new studies confirm existence galaxies almost-no-dark-matter
Hi Glen and Gil, 

What you have below, Glen, is right I think.  To begin with the summary, and put the TLDR afterward, it looks like these diffuse-galaxy results say that gravity stays a clean theory, and we need to identify the origin and nature of dark matter as a separate thing.  While a hard problem, it is a problem that respects the structure of physics as we have been using it.  Gravity is gravity, we can treat matter as “living on it” at all the energies where we have ever done physics, and we need to figure out how they unify, which we don’t really have a theory for at all, but which we have good reason to believe only comes into play at extremely high energies.  

The longer version:

We know Einstein’s GR not only changes the picture of gravity from Newton’s, but for comparable predictions (locations and rates of orbits, their stability, etc.) it requires corrections from Newtonian gravity in the strong-field regime.  The calculations become complicated and hard to do with pencil and paper, but this is okay, because once it is in its geometric language, the Einstein version is in a conceptual sense “cleaner” than the Newtonian version.  

The above view says that Newton becomes a better and better approximation to Einstein the weaker the field gets.  On the whole, galaxy dynamics on the large scale is governed by very weak fields.  So for the radius-dependence of orbital velocities to deviate far from the Newtonian prediction (as they do in most known galaxies) requires either ordinary gravitation with out-of-the-ordinary matter, or a _different_ deviation from Newton, which would exist in the weak-field limit, but only become visible on very large scales.  Since Einstein -> Newton in the very weak field limit, the latter possibility would require a deviation from Einstein too.  I am not sure that could be done conceptually “cleanly” in the same way GR is clean.

So to find that the diffuse galaxies lacking dark matter go back to orbital predictions that converge to weak-field Einstein with no Dark Matter, which is also weak-field Newton with no DM, favors the interpretation that gravity really is just gravity, and that we have to figure out where some additional matter is coming from, just as the accelerating expansion tells us we have to figure out where some “Dark energy” is coming from.  The cosmological constant is an important lynchpin because it is the only observation about the structure of the vacuum for which we really don’t have a “theory” at all.  Anything else we can measure is handled well by standard model physics, though with still some unexplained parameters.  

In a way, this result is the one that could have been expected.  There are now lots of images from gravitational lensing that show “clouds” of DM off-center from galaxies that we can see in the visible.  This especially happens when galaxies collide.  So DM was behaving like matter already, and it is not very surprising to see that maybe it could be all-but-stripped from a galaxy, leaving only a scattering of visible matter.  It would not surprise me if at some point somebody can show that it was a long-ago collision that did this stripping, and much later the diffuse ball of stars re-settled to an ellipsoid.  

Keep in mind, in all of this, that the strong-field limit of GR is getting better and better constrained with the gravitational-wave detections, in addition to all the astrophysical stuff that it has successfully modeled for decades.  So some muddying of GR that only shows up at weak fields would be strange.  

Finally, n.b. that my understanding of this doesn’t qualify as professional — I got off the train too soon.  But I think everything I have said above is a correct account.

All best,

Eric

> On Apr 1, 2019, at 5:55 PM, glen∈ℂ <gepropella at gmail.com <mailto:gepropella at gmail.com> > wrote:
> 
> I'm not sure how magnetism plays into all this.  But it is interesting that these are ultra diffuse galaxies.  Maybe there is something wrong with how we extrapolate the rules in flat space to the rules in very bent space, where everything gets so weird.  It seems (to me) that a regular galaxy would be more like a colloidal solution, with lots of little clumps of bent space (heavy things like brown dwarves[†] and such).  Such a pock-marked, bristly, region of space must be more difficult to model than something relatively well-behaved like an ultra diffuse galaxy. Right?  In the vicinity of "almost singularities" (very heavy objects), any measurement or calculation error will have more of an impact on the result.
> 
> [†] I forgot to turn off the real-time spell checker on this new-to-me computer and, lo and behold, "dwarves" is not the plural of "dwarf"!  WTF?  https://grammarist.com/usage/dwarfs-dwarves/ tells me it's a neologism popularized by Tolkien.  So, by using it, I'm wearing my Dork on my sleeve.
> 
> On 3/31/19 4:24 PM, Gillian Densmore wrote:
>> So it's possible that what we think of as dark matter could be more to do
>> with a whole lot of magnets/lots and lots and lots of gravity energy and
>> makes things go weird?
>> Or weirder?
>> On Sun, Mar 31, 2019 at 3:25 PM glen <gepropella at gmail.com <mailto:gepropella at gmail.com> > wrote:
>>> 
>>> https://news.yale.edu/2019/03/29/new-studies-confirm-existence-galaxies-almost-no-dark-matter
>>> 
>>>> The finding was highly significant because it showed that dark matter is
>>> not always associated with traditional matter on a galactic scale. It also
>>> ruled out several theories that said dark matter is not a substance but a
>>> manifestation of the laws of gravity on a cosmic scale.
>>> --
>>> glen
> 
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

---------- Forwarded message ----------
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To: friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com> 
Cc: 
Bcc: 
Date: Mon, 1 Apr 2019 03:03:25 -0700
Subject: [FRIAM] math-induced vs. math-described creativity (was Re: TheoremDep)
There's a lot to respond to, as always. But, also as always, I'm most attracted to potential conflict. 8^)  And I'm going to be offensive and claim to know you better than you know yourself. >8^D

I'd argue that your personal creativity as a kid wasn't based in math, but based in something more concrete like your physiology and brain wiring.  The math simply turned out to facilitate whatever twitch you'd already manifested.  I'll try to use my go-to anecdote to make my point clearer.  As a kid, my dad consistently accused me of "making excuses" in stead of "providing reasons".  He saw some non-ambiguity in the (social) world that I never saw (still don't see to this day).  Had he been more *logically* inclined, he might have been able to make the distinction clear to me.  After I learned some of the concepts from control theory, I began to realize he (as a former drill sergeant and practicing Catholic) understood personal responsibility as a very interactive, dynamically controlled, always on the lookout, theistic, process.  I tend to be a bit more essentialist and look for critical paths, shaving off the parts of the system that may have less (or negligible) impact on the particular outcome of interest/conflict.

This intolerance for ambiguity, in me, manifested VERY early.  From my incompetent understanding of pop-psy like "All I really Need to Know, I Learned in Kindergarten", my guess is math facilitated your innate creativity as opposed to *founding/basing* your creativity.

But my claim that math would be less successful describing creativity in children than it is in, say, estimating the mass of ultra diffuse galaxies, has more to do with the ambiguity (distinct from uncertainty) in how we understand children.  I suspect you would temporarily abide the claim that a nerd kid who spends all her time playing video games can be just as creative as a more artsy kid who spends her time making up songs on a keyboard.  If we were talking about *adults*, it would be trivial to parse out, disambiguate, how one can be just as creative as another.  But because our understanding of development is so impoverished, it can be difficult to *model* how a child meshes with (relaxes into) the control surface of a keyboard versus that of a game console.

It's not really because "creativity" is ill-defined.  It's because "children" is ill-defined.  Creativity can (and has been) disambiguated in various (inconsistent[†]) ways by various researchers.  We've seen less success disambiguating children.

[†] And, contrary to popular belief, math allows for inconsistency.

On 3/29/19 3:01 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:
> I would claim that more than a little of my own personal creativity was
> based IN mathematics as a child/adolescent.   It was the abstract
> language of math that allowed me to see (and manipulate?) patterns
> across more disparate domains than "natural language" allowed.   It
> wasn't the lack of ambiguity (because my clumsy application
> re-indroduced ambiguity) in Math that drew me, but the ease and
> expressiveness of abstraction.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Frank Wimberly <wimberly3 at gmail.com <mailto:wimberly3 at gmail.com> >
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com> >
Cc: 
Bcc: 
Date: Mon, 1 Apr 2019 06:17:59 -0600
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] 15555-10253-closing-a-gap-to-normal-hearing---white-paper.pdf

I think some people can understand speech pretty quickly but I don't know.  The babies probably learn to do so as well as their age peers but I don't know that either.  Mike probably knows.

Frank

-----------------------------------
Frank Wimberly

My memoir:
https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly

My scientific publications:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2

Phone (505) 670-9918

On Mon, Apr 1, 2019, 1:04 AM Nick Thompson <nickthompson at earthlink.net <mailto:nickthompson at earthlink.net> > wrote:

I will have to look at these.  They can’t parse words on first hearing, can they?   Mike knows a little about this area and he has told me some, but I need to know more.  What I think he has told me is that a relatively primitive input with relatively few leads gives a tremendous benefit, much more than one would expect from the complexity of the cochlea itself.  

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

 <http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com> ] On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Sunday, March 31, 2019 12:08 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com> >
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] 15555-10253-closing-a-gap-to-normal-hearing---white-paper.pdf

Except for the young children.  They some and laugh.

-----------------------------------
Frank Wimberly

My memoir:
https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly

My scientific publications:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2

Phone (505) 670-9918

On Sun, Mar 31, 2019, 11:55 AM Frank Wimberly <wimberly3 at gmail.com <mailto:wimberly3 at gmail.com> > wrote:

Nick,

Have you read about cochlear implant surgery?  When I worked at Eye and Ear Hospital of Pittsburgh, the lab I worked in was doing early research in the area.  These are pieces of hardware that transform sound into electrical signals meaningful to the brain.

Have you seen the videos of people who have been deaf since birth who get such a device.  They inevitably sob when they hear sound for the first time.

Frank

-----------------------------------
Frank Wimberly

My memoir:
https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly

My scientific publications:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2

Phone (505) 670-9918

On Sun, Mar 31, 2019, 11:23 AM Nick Thompson <nickthompson at earthlink.net <mailto:nickthompson at earthlink.net> > wrote:

Hi, Everybody, 

In the home congregation, we have had many interesting conversations about hearing in difficult environments, a conversation not only of intense interest to people interested in computer analysis and representation of sounds but also to a bunch of old guys shouting at each other in a crowded college dining area surrounded by hard surfaces.  Recently, we have been trying to assemble our limited knowledge of the cochlea and to grasp the fact that it is not a bank of discrete resonators doing a Fourier Transform, but an innervated sliver of meat with liquid on both sides coiled up in a tiny snail shell.   We are eager for any signs that a hearing aid company has started to reach beyond differential amplification by means of FFT to actually focusing on the cues that really matter for speech comprehension.    

Anyway, …. Anyway….. .  I skimmed through the “white paper” below and thought that, even though it is “captive” research, it had some interesting features.  Consequently, I thought I would pass it around to the list before I lost track of it.  My friend Jon Zingale accuses me of crowd sourcing my reading and that is EXACTLY what I am doing.  So, beware. 

https://wdh.azureedge.net/-/media/oticon-us/main/download-center/white-papers/15555-10253-closing-a-gap-to-normal-hearing---white-paper.pdf?la=en <https://wdh.azureedge.net/-/media/oticon-us/main/download-center/white-papers/15555-10253-closing-a-gap-to-normal-hearing---white-paper.pdf?la=en&rev=0FC7&hash=B7D7D58F75093770CA7E148F72520C1D6BE28CB1> &rev=0FC7&hash=B7D7D58F75093770CA7E148F72520C1D6BE28CB1

If anybody on the list knows of somebody doing advanced research on how the cochlea passes sound on to the brain and how the brain analyses it, we would love to hear from that person.  

And has for you young folks who think this will never happen to you:  have you noticed that your students and young associates and your daughter’s boyfriends MUMBLE.  The moment you find yourself saying, “Curse these millennials, why don’t they speak up like normal people,” you should be taking an interest in hearing technology. 

Just sayin’

N 

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From: lrudolph at meganet.net <mailto:lrudolph at meganet.net> 
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Date: Mon, 1 Apr 2019 11:14:21 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] new studies confirm existence galaxies almost-no-dark-matter
>  https://grammarist.com/usage/dwarfs-dwarves/ tells me it's a neologism

or, perhaps, a neoarchaeologism?

> popularized by Tolkien.

The OED's only record of it (in a usage citation for "dwarf, n.") is "1818
  W. Taylor in Monthly Mag. 46 26   The history of Laurin, king of the
dwarves."

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Steven A Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com <mailto:sasmyth at swcp.com> >
To: friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com> 
Cc: 
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Date: Mon, 1 Apr 2019 09:17:42 -0600
Subject: [FRIAM] Income Equality

On 3/31/19 11:20 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:

Speakingof the non-adjacent impossible, I woke up the other morning with a fantasy of being in some sort large community meeting, and standing up and asking the question: 

"Why ==>exactly<== is it that everybody shouldn't have the same annual income?"

Try it and you will get a very quick and probably series of blunt answers.

I've had my version of that fantasy and the next step in it is to find the person in the room with the lowest income (the shabby homeless person lurking in the back is a good start) (or just arbitrarily pick some one standing next to you) and offer to "average incomes" with them.    Repeat.   Not everyone will participate, maybe only those with "similar" incomes will share, but the exercise would be useful, even with Monopoly Money.  

Ultimately this can become a "sorting exercise".   It would be much easier to "share" what you have with someone just a little less well off than you.    As a bottom up exercise, (least wealthy shares with next least, repeat) it might work well until you hit the big disparity gaps... The billionaires won't want to share with the millionaires nor they with the upper-middle-class but there might be a trickle-up effect that relieved a LOT in the meantime.   Just sayin'.

I am in the midst (literally today) of a complex of "pay it forward" exercises with friends, organizations and acquaintances who either are, or support folks living in or near homelessness.   A little bit of $$, Time, Attention goes a *LONG* way with these folks.   I'm not averaging my income with them, but in the spirit of religious tithing, I probably do give order 10% of my income and time to these kinds of exercises and *I* believe that provides a several X leverage factor for what I do give.   It can be tedious, it can feel risky, it can be disappointing sometimes, but it feels a lot more connected than writing a check to one of the big charities.  I AM a fan of some of those (many not), so don't want to dissuade that kind of giving, just encourage more personal, local, engaged "sharing".

-Socialist Steve

---------- Forwarded message ----------
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To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com> >
Cc: 
Bcc: 
Date: Mon, 1 Apr 2019 09:58:10 -0600
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] new studies confirm existence galaxies almost-no-dark-matter

Ok you my good sir make this make sense. Sorry for the confusion about my magnetics anology btw. I find this kind of stuff fascinating.

On Mon, Apr 1, 2019 at 3:14 AM Eric Smith <desmith at santafe.edu <mailto:desmith at santafe.edu> > wrote:

Hi Glen and Gil, 

What you have below, Glen, is right I think.  To begin with the summary, and put the TLDR afterward, it looks like these diffuse-galaxy results say that gravity stays a clean theory, and we need to identify the origin and nature of dark matter as a separate thing.  While a hard problem, it is a problem that respects the structure of physics as we have been using it.  Gravity is gravity, we can treat matter as “living on it” at all the energies where we have ever done physics, and we need to figure out how they unify, which we don’t really have a theory for at all, but which we have good reason to believe only comes into play at extremely high energies.  

The longer version:

We know Einstein’s GR not only changes the picture of gravity from Newton’s, but for comparable predictions (locations and rates of orbits, their stability, etc.) it requires corrections from Newtonian gravity in the strong-field regime.  The calculations become complicated and hard to do with pencil and paper, but this is okay, because once it is in its geometric language, the Einstein version is in a conceptual sense “cleaner” than the Newtonian version.  

The above view says that Newton becomes a better and better approximation to Einstein the weaker the field gets.  On the whole, galaxy dynamics on the large scale is governed by very weak fields.  So for the radius-dependence of orbital velocities to deviate far from the Newtonian prediction (as they do in most known galaxies) requires either ordinary gravitation with out-of-the-ordinary matter, or a _different_ deviation from Newton, which would exist in the weak-field limit, but only become visible on very large scales.  Since Einstein -> Newton in the very weak field limit, the latter possibility would require a deviation from Einstein too.  I am not sure that could be done conceptually “cleanly” in the same way GR is clean.

So to find that the diffuse galaxies lacking dark matter go back to orbital predictions that converge to weak-field Einstein with no Dark Matter, which is also weak-field Newton with no DM, favors the interpretation that gravity really is just gravity, and that we have to figure out where some additional matter is coming from, just as the accelerating expansion tells us we have to figure out where some “Dark energy” is coming from.  The cosmological constant is an important lynchpin because it is the only observation about the structure of the vacuum for which we really don’t have a “theory” at all.  Anything else we can measure is handled well by standard model physics, though with still some unexplained parameters.  

In a way, this result is the one that could have been expected.  There are now lots of images from gravitational lensing that show “clouds” of DM off-center from galaxies that we can see in the visible.  This especially happens when galaxies collide.  So DM was behaving like matter already, and it is not very surprising to see that maybe it could be all-but-stripped from a galaxy, leaving only a scattering of visible matter.  It would not surprise me if at some point somebody can show that it was a long-ago collision that did this stripping, and much later the diffuse ball of stars re-settled to an ellipsoid.  

Keep in mind, in all of this, that the strong-field limit of GR is getting better and better constrained with the gravitational-wave detections, in addition to all the astrophysical stuff that it has successfully modeled for decades.  So some muddying of GR that only shows up at weak fields would be strange.  

Finally, n.b. that my understanding of this doesn’t qualify as professional — I got off the train too soon.  But I think everything I have said above is a correct account.

All best,

Eric

> On Apr 1, 2019, at 5:55 PM, glen∈ℂ <gepropella at gmail.com <mailto:gepropella at gmail.com> > wrote:
> 
> I'm not sure how magnetism plays into all this.  But it is interesting that these are ultra diffuse galaxies.  Maybe there is something wrong with how we extrapolate the rules in flat space to the rules in very bent space, where everything gets so weird.  It seems (to me) that a regular galaxy would be more like a colloidal solution, with lots of little clumps of bent space (heavy things like brown dwarves[†] and such).  Such a pock-marked, bristly, region of space must be more difficult to model than something relatively well-behaved like an ultra diffuse galaxy. Right?  In the vicinity of "almost singularities" (very heavy objects), any measurement or calculation error will have more of an impact on the result.
> 
> [†] I forgot to turn off the real-time spell checker on this new-to-me computer and, lo and behold, "dwarves" is not the plural of "dwarf"!  WTF?  https://grammarist.com/usage/dwarfs-dwarves/ tells me it's a neologism popularized by Tolkien.  So, by using it, I'm wearing my Dork on my sleeve.
> 
> On 3/31/19 4:24 PM, Gillian Densmore wrote:
>> So it's possible that what we think of as dark matter could be more to do
>> with a whole lot of magnets/lots and lots and lots of gravity energy and
>> makes things go weird?
>> Or weirder?
>> On Sun, Mar 31, 2019 at 3:25 PM glen <gepropella at gmail.com <mailto:gepropella at gmail.com> > wrote:
>>> 
>>> https://news.yale.edu/2019/03/29/new-studies-confirm-existence-galaxies-almost-no-dark-matter
>>> 
>>>> The finding was highly significant because it showed that dark matter is
>>> not always associated with traditional matter on a galactic scale. It also
>>> ruled out several theories that said dark matter is not a substance but a
>>> manifestation of the laws of gravity on a cosmic scale.
>>> --
>>> glen
> 
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