Uncle Max's Blog

Real Chaos

My intellectual awareness of the world has shadowed the scientific knowledge of the matter of chaos. Chaos Theory became a rage, an established part of empirical discovery, in the early 1970s, and I heard about it soon after, in my early teens. As did popular culture, of course, and these days almost everybody will claim to understanding the metaphor of the 'butterfly effect', even if their grasp is rather loose and clumsy. What isn't often addressed is how much, since then, science has demonstrated that hardly anything in our universe behaves in keeping with the mechanical, Newtonian clockwork interaction of objects in a deterministic system that we have always imagined it is. Since before the age of philosophy, our language established that cause and effect were the primary if not exclusive model of how things work, and to this day people insist that it must be so, even if they have to invent free will and an entire omnipotent being to explain how it could be so. But the empirical (and therefore undeniable) reality is that essentially nothing is mechanistic in the real world, it just appears that way to us because we insist on perceiving it that way. It is a result of hindsight, for the most part, and in the real world of the present and future, only chaos usually has any chance of accurately predicting events, more simplistic models just rely on the averaging of many chaotic interactions over time or space to approximate precision.

Here we go again

I'm going to write something that is going to strike you as fantabulously inaccurate and entirely insane. But it is absolutely and completely true, anyway. Then I'm going to explain why and how that is.

American politics is the least corrupt political system that has ever existed.

That woke somebody up

The stats look almost identical to yesterday, except for the 30 hits on the revised social welfare page last night. (Four on the blog, more than I've had for weeks.) I pulled out most of the stops, setting my camp down firmly in the middle of the "stop white privilege" argument. I'm sure it is going to annoy plenty of people, even maybe a lot of those who might otherwise have been willing to go along with some of what I'm saying, that I bank the entire issue of "social welfare" on nothing other than the oppression of African Americans. This isn't entirely premised on the country's reaction to President Obama, but that does seem to highlight the significance of racism to the cause of social welfare.

OK, so...

OK, so what am I gloriously happy about at the moment? Well, the same as always, really. Jellybeans, and...

The Edge of Compassion

The ragged edge of compassion is tattered and bloody. There is no simple test to tell courageous from stubborn, or angry from scared, or generous from weak.

JSYK

I did get confirmation that the presentation of the Jellybean Mystery at the UU Church in Pottstown will be sometime in June, most probably. But things are boring here, so I'm not sure I'll have anything much to say before then.

Being a Wise Consumer

Been busy, Mya got sick yesterday and I spent the day with her, home from school. That set me behind, and some domestic stuff kept me occupied. I had a short conversation with my Mom that prompted me to post. It's a simple thing, a method of coping with my disability, in fact. It is a rule I have for dealing with a consumer marketplace, trying to make both cost-effective and high quality buying decisions without the ability to plan or capacity to outwit whatever market I'm in.

Sense and Contradiction

Decades ago, when the ideas of Naom Chomsky were first being promulgated through society, I remember being presented with a 'demonstration' that his ideas had merit which seemed either tedious or inaccurate to me at the time. Of course, such thoughts in a young person are to be dismissed, a naive and uneducated intellect being incapable of correcting a well educated and well respected expert. I, too, dismissed the notion that I had noticed something wrong with the theory because I was somehow unconvinced by the example. But I just stumbled upon the same classical presentation of this issue in the book I'm reading.

"Colourless green ideas sleep furiously."

I mean, really

To be honest, it seems a little odd to me that educated people write things like this (from that book I mentioned, The Language Wars) without noticing the fact that it isn't a unique situation in the least:

"The word grammar has a number of meanings. People speak about 'bad grammar' or 'correcting' someone's grammar as though there is agreement about what grammar itself is, but the word is elastic."

So, here we are...

Monday morning.