Understanding

 

Hotel California

On a dark desert highway
Cool whip in my hair
Warm smell of colitas
Rising up through the air

Er…, aren’t the correct lyrics “cool wind in my hair”

As long as there has been language, there is the chance to misunderstand that language.  The late, great Gilda Radner had a recurring sketch on misunderstanding on Saturday Night Live https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZLeaSWY37I.  and made “Never Mind” a catchphrase.  I was raised in Rhode Island, maybe the capital of misunderstanding, whose very name is due to a misunderstanding.  The full name of the state, which dates back to colonial times, is Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.  Rhode Island technically only refers to what the indigenous people called Aquidneck Island, where the city of Newport is located.  A Dutch explorer called it "Roodt Eylandt" because of the red clay lining the shore and the early settlers though he said that  was because it looked like the Greek Island of Rhodes.  Of course those same early settlers though that the Indigenous Tribal village of Montaup was the tribe trying to say “Mount Hope”, which is that region’s name today and may be responsible for the state motto, “Hope”.  We are losing many of these misunderstandings which gave rise to regional slang (the national name for the sub is replacing that of Philadelphia’s “Hoagie”, (the sandwich originally eaten for lunch on Hog Island), or Rhode Island's “Grinders”, (a cold lunch meat sandwich on an Italian Roll, which your teeth needed to grind).  But as long as there is language there will be the opportunity to misunderstand language.  Thus the ancient Romans worshipped Father Jupiter, which the Greeks would call Zeus Pater.  The French claim no credit for French Fries, so the French were only amused, not offended, when Americans started calling them Freedom Fries.

Misheard song lyrics can be a particular source of amusement. In addition to the one misquoted above, I have a particular problem understanding the singing of John Fogarty of Creedence Clearwater Revival.  I remember proudly singing “There’s a Bathroom on the Right” when the correct lyrics were “There’s a Bad Moon on the Rise”; or “Cinemascope Perfect” when the correct lyrics were ”Sinister Purpose”.  One of my college roommates was amazed when he learned that when he was saying "It’s a dogie dog world” he was actually saying “It’s a dog eat dog world”.  As long as there is understanding, there will be misunderstanding.  Ask someone “Why A Duck?”

Hourglasses

 

Days of Our Lives

“Like sands through the hourglass,
so are the days of our lives,”
said the voice of Macdonald Carey,
welcoming viewers to the
“Days of Our Lives” soap opera
as a large hourglass appeared on the TV screen.

What if our universe is also an hourglass.

First some digressions. MacDonald Carey was a Hollywood star. His participation in a soap opera legitimized that soap opera to my late mother. Consequently she could approve of, and watch, those “stories.”  She was less than amused when her children started watching another soap opera, Dark Shadows, starring another Hollywood star, Joan Bennett. But it was not until last year when I listened to the Love is a Crime podcast that I understood why she thought there was difference in Hollywood stardom that was not tainted by scandal.

An hourglass has a small point through which the grains of sand pass. The shape of the hourglass is a hyperboloid, with a extremely  narrow passage in the middle. The shape of the hourglass on either side of its mid point is very similar to the early inflation in the universe after the Big Bang.  This is why I am proposing that not only is the shape of the universe hyperbolic, but that the universe in which we exist is only one side of that hourglass and is separated from the other side of the hourglass by the Big Bang. But the Arrow of Time is such that you can’t move from one side of the hourglass to the other without upsetting everything and turning it all over. Thus go the days of our lives.

Free Will

 

Jesus Met the Woman at the Well

She said, "This man, this man, He must be the prophet"
She said, "This man, this man, He must be the prophet"
She said, "This man, this man, He must be the prophet"
"He done told me everything I've ever done."

And that ain’t the half of it.

But Jesus went to the Mount of Olives.

At dawn he appeared again in the temple courts, where all the people gathered around him, and he sat down to teach them. The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group and said to Jesus, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him.

But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger.  When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground.

At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”

“No one, sir,” she said.

“Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.”

The Gospel of John, Chapter 8, Verses 1 through 11.

In other words, Jesus will not condemn us for our choices, but does hopes that we make the correct choices.  So I guess that Jesus is Pro-Choice, not only as it is currently used, but also in a larger context?

It is a tradition in my family to watch a Charlie Brown Christmas each year.  To paraphrase Linus in that show, “And that is what Free Will is all about Charlie Brown”.  God does not condemn us. God condemns certain choices.  And we alone make those choices. Thus if there is any condemning, we are condemning ourselves.

Consulting

 

Fugue for Tinhorns

I got the horse right here,
The name is Paul Revere,
And here's a guy that says if the weather's clear,
Can do,
Can do,
This guy says the horse can do

That guy is me.

The lyrics above are from Guys and Dolls and were sung by the racetrack touts, including Nicely-Nicely. For all of my public and private career, I realize that I am no different than a tout. A tout tries to make a prediction about the outcome of a random event. Ethical touts will use whatever information and methods are available to give their customers an edge in knowing the outcome before the event. Unethical touts will tell their customers what they themselves don’t believe and those touts may tell conflicting stories to different customers of the same event, in hopes of one of them being the winning side.

I have been a traffic modeler for most of my life. Like a racetrack tout, I have been trying to beat the odds and make predictions. But I hope that I never lose sight of the fact that they are only predictions. When I forecast a trip table, forecast mode share, or forecast volumes on a link, I am not guaranteeing an outcome. All of the methods in these predictions are based on identifying the most probable outcome among many, not the only outcome that will happen.

There are contests in which there are only a limited number of outcomes, for example Tic‑Tac‑Toe. By analyzing all these outcomes, it is possible to see what future outcomes can result from each current outcome. If you play first in Tic-Tac-Toe, then you may have a winning strategy on each play.  However, the player playing second can always make a play in response that forces a draw. Thus it is possible to develop a book on each play that will lead to at least a draw. Unless the opposing player makes a mistake and does not make their best move, it is impossible to win at Tic Tac Toe.  It is possible to memorize that “book” of best plays. Because the number of plays is limited, it is even possible to train a chicken to play Tic-Tac-Toe. (If a chicken makes a mistake, then it is eaten and won’t play again. Fortunately for them, politicians don’t taste very good).  The book in Checkers is larger but it does exist. The book in Chess is even larger and is incomplete at present. A Rubik’s Cube has 43,003,274,489,856,000 positions, only one of which is the winning position. And yet there are people who have memorized the best way to get from any position to the winning position, such that there are contests of how fast you can ‘solve” a Rubik’s Cube (the current record is 3.47 seconds).

The challenge of traffic modeling is that there is not yet a complete book on how to get to a winning solution. Until then, like Nicely-Nicely, I will keep touting customers on ways to beat the odds.

Spacetime

 

It’s About Time

It's about time,
It's about space,
About strange people in the strangest place.
It's about time,
It's about flight,
Travelin' faster than the speed of light.

It's about Minkowski spacetime!

Minkowski space combines inertial space and time manifolds (x,y) with a non-inertial reference frame of space and time (x',t') into a four-dimensional model relating a position (inertial frame of reference) to the field (physics). A four-vector (x,y,z,t) consisting of coordinate axes such as a Euclidean space plus time may be used with the non-inertial frame to illustrate specifics of motion, but should not be confused with the spacetime model generally.          

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minkowski_space

What this says!!!!  I may not understand this, but Einstein apparently did!

If space time is hyperbolic and not Euclidean how does this change things?

Minkowski space is used to describe the light cone , e.g. world lines of light, moving through space.

This cone looks very much like a one-sheet hyperboloid narrowed to a point at the origin, which is identical to a two-sheet hyperboloid where the separation between the two sheets is zero.

I have previously suggested that the shape of the universe is hyperbolic. (IMHO it appears locally Euclidean but is universally hyperbolic, much like geometry on the surface of the earth appears locally Euclidean but, over very large distances comparable to the radius of the Earth, is non-Euclidean and spherical.  I know that am not the originator of that hypothesis.  https://dbeagan.blogspot.com/2022/07/forever.html

If the shape of the universe is hyperbolic, then mathematics should seek non-Euclidean solutions. This has an implication on the speed-volume curve used in my field of traffic engineering, but also seems to have a bearing on:

·        physics, the Lorentz transform might be γ=1+ln(cosh(v/c)±sinh(v/c)), gravity might be only an apparent force and not one of the three intrinsic forces;

·        statistics, the only valid normal distribution might be the logistics distribution with s=0.5;

·        sociology and political science, tolerance, a SD of 0.6413, may be an intrinsic part of group dynamics, and

·        many other disciplines ( e. g. I suspect that my speed-volume curve findings will have an implication on Fluid Dynamics.)

Right and Wrong

 

You May Be Right

You may be right
I may be crazy
Oh, but it just may be a lunatic you're looking for
Turn out the light
Don't try to save me
You may be wrong for all I know
But you may be right

But what if you are wrong and I am right?

All things being equal, there is, on average, a 50% chance that an individual is right and a 50% chance that an individual is wrong.  In most authoritarian governments, where those can be differentiated as to how the sovereign of the government is chosen, e.g. a dictator, a hereditary monarch, an elected monarch, etc. but the sovereign of the government is an individual.  The are also other authoritarian forms of government where the sovereign is a smaller group within the whole group. That is, not an individual but e.g. a junta, an oligopoly, single party rule, etc. where not all individuals in the larger group are members of that smaller group.  That smaller group still has a 50% chance of being right and a 50% chance of being wrong.

The question about how an individual within a group, or a smaller group within a larger group,  behave is the subject of distributions within statistics.  That is what averages are all about.  An individual is 100% right or 100% wrong but there is a difference between a group and an individual. A fair coin flip is on average 50% heads, but on each individual flip of the coin it will be 100% heads or 100% tails, and not 50% head and 50% tails. 

The government in the US is not an individual or a smaller group, but is all of the People.  A smaller group, or a large group, has not only a mean, its average value, but also a standard deviation from that average value, tolerance.  If a group is normal, then that standard deviation will NOT be zero.

Debt Ceiling

 

Sixteen Tons

You load 16 tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
St. Peter, don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store

Debt is bad, but the alternative is worse.

The US is facing a debt crisis of its own making. Its Congress is responsible for all spending and revenue bills. If revenue is insufficient to match spending, then debt is a way of time shifting revenue from the future. So if Congress has authorized spending, and Congress has authorized revenue, then Congress has de facto authorized debt.

If spending increases because of price inflation, and revenue is lowered because of inflation (e.g. the tax brackets are adjusted for inflation) they why isn't the debt ceiling also adjusted for inflation.

You might not be old enough to remember, but there was a time when prices were more stable than today. Then Nixon (er…wasn’t he a Republican) applied his Shock and dollars that were used in international trade could no longer be used to trade for US gold, so they competed with domestic dollars to buy other assets and unsurprisingly inflation was the result.            
https://dbeagan.blogspot.com/2018/08/the-happening-riding-high-on-top-of.html

Then Reagan (er... wasn’t he a Republican too?) promoted the first of what became many tax, revenue, cuts. https://dbeagan.blogspot.com/2020/06/taxman.html So if you cut revenue, and have inflation increasing spending, then don’t you need more debt??

Congress pretends that it also has a debt ceiling. (I guess Congress forgot that it authorized spending and revenue). That debt ceiling was last raised in 2021. At that time, the debt ceiling was set at 31.4 trillion dollars, but isn’t that in 2021 dollars. If that debt ceiling was expressed in 2022 dollars, then it would have been $33.91 trillion. So if revenue is in 2023 dollars and spending is in 2023 dollars, then why isn’t the debt ceiling also in 2023 dollars. If the debt ceiling is $33.91 trillion, or even higher given the fact that we are in 2023 not 2022, before Democrats start talking with the Republican House, if Republicans caused inflation to increase spending, and Republican tax cuts have decreased revenue, then why doesn’t the principle of "you broke it, you own it" apply?