[FRIAM] A Cloud (Thread?) Never Dies

[Steve Smith]

Jon -

Bombastic free-for-all is an apt description.

I think "what is a cloud" came up when I used my own "watching a cloud
evolve" as an example of how one might begin to develop an intuition for
higher-dimensional objects/phenomena through the limits of our visual
system.   This was for Dave's question about trying to develop an
intuition for the 4-polytopes he thinks he
observes/perceives/experiences in his dreams/visions.

I tossed in another extra degree of freedom in the discussion by
introducing SimTable's aspirations to use the often-widely-visible
skyscape of clouds and even more directly interestingly, smoke plumes
for the primary purpose of calibrating multiple cameras whose view
frustums might include the same clouds.   This augments capturing or
pre-stating the camera extrinsics (location/pose) and intrinsics (focal
length/FOV, etc.) and the use of landscape features (skyline, etc.) for
tweaking calibration.   Smoke plumes, of course, have more direct
utility to the problem at hand, of estimating and locating wildfire as
it evolves.

The first observation about clouds is very intuitional and perhaps
whimsical...  maybe I really can't intuit anything about the
distribution of atmospheric conditions by observing the evolution of a
cloud...  and the second is very practical and any mathematical
abstractions obtained for that purpose are only as meaningful as they
are useful.    I appreciate your offering of the _Alexander Horned
Sphere_ in that spirit.

Clouds are interesting "alternative" objects to say mountains or
buildings because of there ephemerality and ambiguity of boundary,
etc.   This tangent may be of interest to those considering "what means
object".

Over my shoulder in many of our zoom calls, sits a hand-painted and
framed phrase by the hand (and mind?) of Thich Naht Hahn which states "A
Cloud Never Dies".   This use of the term "Cloud" references (for me)
all of the observations above and many more.   Thus the explosion of
threads when things like this are discussed on FriAM.  

Some of us are primarily an analytical bunch, wanting to dissect things
down until we feel we understand (apprehend) the parts directly and then
by extension, possibly understand the original whole in that way.   Of
course, the theme that brought this group together is bigger than
that.   Systems Thinking, Complexity, Synthesis, Emergence, Exaptation,
Spandrels, Attractors, etc.  are all complementary to the traditions of
Analytical Thinking, yet compatible.

So, on this list, I really have no other goal perhaps than to put "yet
more perspectives on the table" on the off chance that someone will
recognize one of them and provide some parallax that is useful (or
interesting) to me.   Well, that and to _scratch the itches_ that
sometimes spontaneously jump up under the casts that others try to put
around what they see to be a broken limb, thinking that reducing the
degrees of freedom is the best way to "put it right".  

We ARE the proverbial "Blind Men and the Elephant".   Our meta-trickster
made this observation weeks ago:

    http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/2020/05/the-elephant-in-room.html

- Steve

On 6/5/20 11:13 PM, Jon Zingale wrote:
> I was hoping you would sketch out more of your objection
> to my claim that the Alexander horned sphere provides an
> example of a fractal space whose topology is given simply
> as a sphere. In speech, I can feel pressured to make the
> best of the few words I have room to express and sometimes
> at the expense of accuracy. Analysis of the Alexander horned
> sphere (and the space it encloses) is a bit more nuanced
> than I let on, the details of which may be helpful for our
> discussion of clouds. OTOH, Friam discussions are sometimes
> nothing short of a bombastic free-for-all where injecting
> aporia or the occasional first order footnote is about
> /as good as one can hope for/. If it turns out to help our
> discussion here, I will dust off my copy of /Hocking & Young/.
>
> Yes, a discussion of limit points would be necessary for
> investigating the topology of this pathological object.
> Analysis of its interior and exterior yield very different
> results, while the ball is simply connected its boundary
> is not. Somehow, this off-the-top-of-my-head example
> seemed to be relevant enough to Nick's itch that I hoped
> it would slow things down.
>
> Nick, Steve, Frank, et al.
>
> Before we dive into Mandelbrot thumping, or some other
> obnoxious witch hunt of popular mathematics, what exactly
> is our goal? I don't mind beginning with Nick's definition of
> a cloud, but only if that means we work to prove what is
> and what is not an entailing theorem. Further, I will hope
> that we /do not/ confuse these theorems for truths about
> our material world. I maintain that any definition we start
> with will have /some/ domain of applicability, but we are
> far too along in our understanding of rhetoric (as a culture)
> to waste time building strawmen. Granted this, if Nick wants
> to use /shrouds/ as a way of talking about Darboux sums
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darboux_integral>
> converging to Riemann Integrals, say, well fine. I am not
> entirely sure there is any particular reason we need to
> dive into an analytic hole, but hey. Nick, if there is a
> question underlying all of this demand for technology,
> please state it. EricC, however, helped me to feel justified
> in claiming that asking /what is a cloud, really/ is not a
> productive question.
>
> Jon
>
>
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