Sunday, October 30, 2022
where is randomness?
You would have to point at something strange in quantum mechanics to have randomness, namely the collapsing of the quantum field, as it is supposed to do in an experimental set up. The multiverse view of life, just has alternaive paths, but no randomness.
I cannot see that randomness can be proved to exist. Indeed it is perhaps a stupid concept. It is much better to think in terms of ' cannot be predicted with our resourses'. If you cannot see the mechanism, what happens is unpredictable.
One could see a persons life as a sort of story book being experienced. It is all there, written down, but you don't know what is going to happen next. The story is not random, just unpredictable.
We can take certain unpredictable examples, and compare them with some experimental results, and talk about our inability to see a difference between them, this does not need anything random to actually exist as a standard.
Martin
is brushing your teeth bad for your biome?
All bateria in your biome go in through your mouth. Most will go in from your food. Your food bugs are the ones in your biome. So cleaning out your mouth might be a poor idea. Cleaning in, might be better. And not using toothpaste ?
Maybe do it i two phases?
Typical problem of thinking ckeanliness is healthy.
Martin
Friday, October 28, 2022
navigating by the star
It occurred to me that the sun moves reasonably fast relative to me. Sometimes it is coming nearer me as in the morning and sometimes going further from me as in the evening. Its light should be slightly bluer in the morning and ever so slightly redder in the evening. Similarly these effects will be greater when near the equator than at the poles.
You could in principle know from the colour of the suns light that you are on some line of equal hue. You dont have even to see the sun directly, and the light could be reflected light just as well.
The shift at a specific point will be greatest to blue at 6am and least at 6pm. As you go towards the poles the shift reduces down basically to zero. At midday the shift will be zero.
I guess the lines of equal hue are those of latitude if you took 6am and 6pm as the poles. Clearly these two points are the points of maximum and minimum hue change.
Could birds use this and a sense of time to navigate without actually seeing the sun. Maybe the mystery organ for navigating is the eye with colour vision
Now all of this is assuming the rotational velicity of the earth on its axis can be observed shifting the spectrum. If not so, you could try using the speed of the earth's orbit around the sun, giving a shift to the average background of the cosmos. It will be bluer in the pm, compared to the am, with a gradual change scoss the sky
Martin
Friday, October 21, 2022
the moon is a more useful calendar than the sun
I don't know why, but I was thinking of some of the rather 'aged' people in old testament. The ones where they live to ridiculous ages. Noah for instance lived to 950 years old, according the Bible History web site.
It made me think how useless the sun is for counting time. You can do hours and years approximately, and but days you have to separately count. But actually it is pretty useless as a source of information.
But the moon is a much better instrument of time, with not only lunar months, which you can count, and years, in the same way as with the sun, but also you have a pretty good guess at the number of the day within the lunar month: Using the phases of the moon, of course. Indeed the you would be mad to pay too much attention to the sun, if you have a decent moon to look at. This would be true of any planetary system.
No wonder some major religions do things on a lunar calendar basis. Easter etc.
It would seem totally reasonable to think that one might count long periods in terms of lunar months, rather than years. So my thought is that when recording any number, people often assume that the reader knows what units are, and do not specify it. Is it that Noah is actually not 950 years old, but rather 950 lunar months old
950/c13 is roughly 73 years old. Which seems to me to be a reasonably good age to live to in those days.
You could argue that the ancients knew perfectly well what they were recording, and that the 950 is the correct figure for Noah's age. It is just that people just forgot about the unit change.
I remember the company I worked for managed to do a double exchange rate conversion for one country when consolidating accounts. And on another occasion, they got the currency units a factor of 1000 out. These were for small businesses, and it hardly altered the grand total.
I suppose the real issue with the lunar clock is that one needs to have rather a lot of leap days, or leap months around to keep the seasons in a sensible place in the calendar. Actually I don't know how Islam manages this, or even how they count years.
martin
Saturday, October 01, 2022
in a deterministic world, is there probability?
I think i might have heard something like this mentioned on Sean Carrolls podcast. It is something that has been working away at me, somewhere in the background.
I guess that schrodinger's equation is rolling the dice, and its collapse is the measurement. It gets a bit more dodgy in the many worlds scenario.
I imagine that what we are doing is constructing a model of something, and then judging how good the model is. In particular we are constructing a probabalistic model.
It is tempting to think that the 'something' is itself probabalistic, and we are finding it. But this is not something that is being tested. Indeed it could be tricky to show something created by man is probabalistic or not.
So in someway probabalistic models are entirely man made, and just an example of modelling tool kit. For example, prime numbers really are totally deterministic, but probabilty models may help us imagine the basic structures and behaviours, a little bit.
I still need to think about this. It makes me think that the bayesian approach is conceptually less problematic, particularly because it is not constructing anything, but rather refining something give it. You cannot contruct anything from nothing.
Martin
Martin
