[FRIAM] We Shall Know our own Chirality

[Steve Smith]

> Glen, 
>
> Rest assured.  You will never be mistaken for a wing nut.  You just don't spin that easy.  Spoken as somebody who has tried to spin you many times. 
>
> By the way, our joint exploration of the wing-nut metaphor last Friday was a wonderful example of the intentionality of metaphors. For me, a wing nut is a fastener that can be applied to a machine screw without a tool.  "Spinning off wildly"  was a feature I never really focused on, hence I never really understood the metaphor until you-guys explained it to me.  Yup!  
>
> So, if "spinnability" is a feature of wing nuts, then "spinning off wildly" is a bug, right.  But for the purposes of the metaphor (as you use it) it is a feature.  So the feature/bug relation is another example of the extension-intension relation (aka epiphenomenality).  
>
> Ok.  Now that I have thoroughly bent your thread, I think I will go eat breakfast. 
>
> Snow grains, thunder in Santa Fe.  The thunder echoes in the covid-emptied streets.  Apocalyse!

Nick -

Love the meta-Haiku!   Well done...

The metaphorical mangle continues with your use of "thread" as I was
tangented (in my own mind) into the details of threaded fasteners, their
history, and idiosyncrasies.   After doing a full overhaul/replacement
of my solar hot-water system and well-house, I am very familiar with the
details and finickyness of a multitude of of pipe-threads (each system
is order-40-60 years old with a dozen upgrades/repairs in the
interim)...   and sing the praises of teflon tape which helps ameliorate
some  of their design/manufacturing shortcomings as well as my own. 

I suspect Glen IS a wingnut but has enough viscosity in his threads to
keep from spinning wildly, and also like an Escher self-drawing hand,
his homuculii all take turns spinning one another as an ensemble that on
average somehow never quite "spins off the end"...   sort of a
spin-glass composed of wingnuts?

A few (many?) years ago, Cody, during a typical WedTech lunch (many
talking over many about several topics of tech-interest) handed me one
of the largest wingnuts I'd ever handled.... it was not too big to fit
into the watch-pocket of my jeans but it was at least a 3/8" thread with
a "wingspan" of 1.5 inch ( to be SAE rather than ISO oriented) and was
hefty enough to feel like I could give it a good fling across the room
with boomerang like-precision and bean a human-wingnut with it.   I
looked it over, admired it and devilishly and handed it back to him
asking if he realized it was a "Left" wingnut rather than a "Right"
one...  True to form, his response was the familiar non-committal "I
guess so" or "oh yeah?" (he may correct me here if he remembers the
exchange at all) as he said, "no, it is for you" as he refused to take
it back.   I shrugged, thanked him, and slipped it into my coin/watch
pocket in my jeans where I often squirrel away such oddities until they
disappear somewhere (laundry, couch-cushion, ???) in a week or two.   I
assumed he was making a personal comment with it, based on some FriAM or
WedTech conversation I'd been blathering on about online (like a
wingnut)...   A month or so later, we were across the same table, and I
was reminded of the conversation and reached into my pocket for it and
found that a small "badge" had replaced it.  This pewter faux-badge had
come to me in a similar fashion and the wingnut had found it's way into
someone else's pocket.   The badge read "Santa Fe Brothel Inspector"....
it was a kind of base and crude topic but it seemed appropriate to hand
it off to Cody unexplained in payback to the "wingnut".   I wonder if he
still has it, or even remembers any of this?

I have certainly enjoyed the benefit of *real* wingnuts which not only
can (usually) be secured and loosened by hand but are particularly handy
when the threaded male portion has a lot of threads to traverse...   I
do love the "momentum" the wings offer when you give them a whirl,
compared to "spinning on/off" a conventional nut.  I often use a
conventional nut with a wingnut following it as a "locker".... the
wingnut tightened against the conventional nut binds well enough to keep
the two from loosening even if they aren't more than hand-tight
otherwise.   Useful when the goal isn't to *cinch* something down with
the nut(s), just secure it firmly. 

As a child, my father told me something I took as gospel (as children
often do from their parents even if they doubt them otherwise).  He said
that the Japanese used left-hand threads by convention while "the West"
had landed on "right hand" threads long ago.   He may have conflated
handedness with the dimensional standard differences between metric and
english units...  and as I grew up I encountered occasional
left-hand-threads occurring for various reasons such as turnbuckles and
counter-precession-spin-off threading in high speed machining, airplane
propellors and even heavy-duty pickup (rear) axle lugs (I spent a huge
amount of time on my first 3/4 ton pickup *tightening* the lug nuts on
the left-hand side of my rear-axle before someone got me down off the
lug-wrench I was jumping on and explained my misunderstanding).    As of
today I find no evidence of his attribution to "the Japanese"... or
perhaps when he explained it all I conflated his explaining handedness
with metric vs english fastener standards (though we owned an early VW
pickup which surely had metric fasteners as well?)...  

Finally, the punchline of my subject-line refers to Dave Egger's first
novel:  "We Shall Know our Velocity
<https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/feb/15/featuresreviews.guardianreview29>"
which triggered in ME "We Shall Know our Chirality" when I read it...  
I highly recommend his work as well as a contemplation on the
implications of our "chirality", whether it be our politics (wing
nuttery) or that of our DNA...  it DOES seem that if  DNA
evolved/emerged/exapted from RNA into a chiral-double strand more than
once or a few times, that we might have an entirely distinct set of
organic life as we know it which is genetically independent, in spite of
being entirely protein-chemistry compatible?   Or does gene-fragment
exchange happen in single-strands?

I wish I had the focus to compose a Haiku to respond to Nick's throwdown...

- Steve


> Nick 
>
> Nicholas Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
> Clark University
> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
>  
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of u?l? ???
> Sent: Tuesday, November 24, 2020 11:19 AM
> To: FriAM <friam at redfish.com>
> Subject: [FRIAM] The next Heterodox University faculty member
>
>
> http://www.quantumthom.com/LetterToFerrisCommunity.pdf
> https://fsutorch.com/2020/11/18/science-professor-denies-science/
>> The account’s other tweets in regard to COVID-19 say things such as:
>> “Guess what the covid stunt has failed. You won’t get your leftist new world order.”
>> “Covid19 is another jewish revolution.”
>> “F— this evil wizard,” in reference to a video of Dr. Anthony Fauci. 
>> “Stand up for yourselves people, and stop falling for this corona virus hoax!”
>> “I’d say covid-19 is fake. An evil medical system just killed a bunch of old people.”
>
> From the Amazon page for his book:
> "Thomas Brennan is a professor of physics at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan, where he's taught physics and astronomy since 2014. He completed his PhD thesis on the topic of sonoluminescence in 2009 at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He also received a BA in Physics from the University of Chicago and an MS in Physics from UCLA. His research interests include both experimental and mathematical physics as well as astronomy."
>
> I continue to marvel at how someone seemingly intelligent can fly off the bolt [⛧] so easily. As one who regularly expresses my opinions about non-professional things, I consistently wonder how/when it will or has already come back to bite me, not to assert that I'm seemingly intelligent or anything. It also questions the coherence of the "public intellectual", best exhibited by people like Chomsky, or Pinker, or Tyson. We need them ... but they put themselves at great risk. So thanks to all those people who manage to speak outside their competence, but do so without flying off the bolt.
>
>
> [⛧] Yes, I'm aware that "wingnut" is often understood as a nut who sits on the wing of a political spectrum. But I prefer to think of it as someone who's easily "spun up", spun on, or spun off. This fits nicely with the old saying that there's a fine line between genius and crazy, it's only a difference in chirality. That batsh¡t old man who spends his lifetime in his basement working on his time machine exhibits the same dedication as the non-batsh¡t microbiologist who spends his lifetime in the cancer lab. They're both easily spun up, wingnuts on a different spectrum.
>
> --
> ↙↙↙ uǝlƃ
>
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