Our Mythology

I've been very sensitive to how ritual enriches life. Rituals are things like getting the same tea everytime you go to a coffee shop, or smelling a book before you read it, or washing your hands before a meal. And as little and arbitrary as they are, my life is richer and happier because of them. For many people still living in this world, mythology reinforces these rituals: History, Great People and Big Pictures conspire to weave the trivial flourishes of one life into a bigger narrative that accounts for everything that has ever existed.

The places chronicled in the Dictionary of Imaginary Places, the beings explored in the Book of Imaginary Beings and all the musics with echoes have been wandering my mind. I look for little worlds everywhere, and I cherish the people who create them .

I want a mythology that I can use in this world, a world with lots of different cultures, too much information, cars, computers and cites that juxtapose all of the approaches to beauty that exist. I'll start with the sky. Who are in the stars and what are their stories? Here are the sky's current labels: http://www.astromax.org/con-page/con-88.htm. Here are the sky's current stories: http://www.astromax.org/con-page/winter/gem-01.htm

Help me rewrite the sky. Here is are some references:



Sky charts
http://www.ed.arizona.edu/ward/Twinkle/jul98sky.gif

Very Very detailed Sky charts
http://www.aavso.org/charts/Constellation
for example:
http://www.aavso.org/charts/Constellation/ORI.

Detailed South African Sky charts
http://www.saao.ac.za/fileadmin/images/whatsup/jan08.jpg
try changing jan08 to aug08 or feb07 etc, for the south african sky in other parts of the year.

Chinese sky charts (Chinese constellations):
http://www.chinapage.com/astronomy/constellation28.html
Leading, at the bottom, to
http://www.chinapage.com/astronomy/chart/nexhibit6.gif
and
http://www.chinapage.com/astronomy/chart/nexhibit5.gif

Fictional Skies:
http://www.therugs.com/zoom.asp?id=COURMETcon

No Meat Yes Liquor

Wikipedia has me pretty much convinced to go vegetarian and to not quit alcohol (there is (or was until recently) even a short section on talking to teetotalers about starting drinking).

RP for PR

After watching the returns from Tuesday night's New Hampshire debacle, in which the Dragon Lady secured her seat for long haul, and Ol' Reliable simply kept his warm, I was reminded of a state in dire need of representation in the modern American electoral process: Puerto Rico.

Yes, that disrespected commonwealth, or unincorporated organized territory as it's known in some parts, has newfound importance. It is time that Borikén had the earliest primary therefore ridding ourselves of the discomfort we feel seeing in seeing White Power at its finest; whether at play in the cornfields or at work in granite quarries, these states don't represent the changing demographics of America in the least.

Puerto Rico is not only heavily Latino, it is Latino. It's not Mexico, sure, but census projections are far more favorable to our hot-blooded hermanos, even if they aren't the much-vilified "wetbacks" smuggled along with a coyote. Indeed, by 2050 Latinos will represent exactly half the population of white America, and the majority in states like California and Arizona.

So here is how it works: politicians will cast aside their pea coats for tropical garb and the process will have a twist. PR is still, as of last month, set to be ruled as a territory under the plenary powers of the US Congress, and yet the two parties here make their hay out the independence issue. So you'll get your typical retail politics, only this time in order to appeal to a large swath of the population they'll have to openly court absolute sovereignty.

Everyone will be forced to speak, or at least ape, español. The opportunities for gaffes are endless, as even the most polished candidate will be sure to put Kennedy's "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech to shame. (The reader should note that I'm very aware that Kennedy's grammar was correct when he gave the speech, but the jelly-filled doughnut tale will always captivate). Can you imagine Hillary Clinton's tearful address, rehearsed after watching a stirring telenovela?

Most importantly, the island will be easy to dispose of with all the candidates buzzing about like pheromone-driven bees. You see, the US Navy had been dropping bombs on nearby Vieques until 2003; a continuation of a strafing operation wouldn't be unthinkable.

But I guess we'll have to wait until another plebiscite goes out, until the statehood advocates finally get their way. The prophecy will be revealed on that day of judgment, though, this much we know for sure. Ron Paul will assume the Oval Office with howitzer in hand and hundreds of gold bricks stored inside his blimp.

A Simple Model for Understanding Emergence

The model is for understanding changes in complexity over scale in the context of cooperation, and also, with very few parts, offers valuable clarification of ideas like robustness, modularity and the 'plant-animal' spectrum (Sometimes you cut some living organism into two and both parts die, sometimes both parts survive and sometimes just one part dies. Does this have significance for a general understanding in interrelationship, and if so, how?). So:

There are 5 cells. Each cell has five parts and manufactures one unit of chemical in each part. Each cell needs to have 5 different chemicals at any moment to be legal. If a cell is not receiving a unit of all five different chemicals, it is not legal.

In the simplest case, each of the five cells is using each part of itself to produce each chemical it needs for itself. Five parts, five chemicals, easy. Each cell is simple and legal.

Now for the next step. Let them share chemical. This makes possible (but not practical) an important new configuration: We can make it so each cell is specializing in one chemical. Cell One makes five units of Chemical One. Cell Two makes five units of Chemical Two, etc. All cells are sharing, so each cell is receiving the five chemicals that it needs to be legal.

I noted that this is possible but not practical because if we separate one cell from the other four, than all five are illegal. The removed cell is receiving five units of only one chemical and the other four are receiving all but that chemical.

At this step of the model, this 'collective' arrangement offers no advantages over the 'individualist' arrangement above.

Now let us introduce economies of scale. Within one cell, if Chemical One is being produced by two of the cell's parts, it gets four units of that Chemical One. If it is produced by three parts (3/5 of its manufacturing capacity) it produces 9 units of Chemical One and so on. The benefit can be any kind of greater-than-linear growth, I chose n^2 for this model where n is number of parts devoted to manufacture of a particular chemical. Lets call the exponent of this function the "economy". In this case the economy is 2. In the starting case, it was 1.

Where the economy was 1, there was no important difference between the collectivist and individualist arrangements. With an economy greater than one, the collective arrangement produces more chemical than the individualist arrangement. Where five individualist cells collectively produce 25 units of chemical, the cooperating cells collectively produce 125 units of chemical.

With a small tweak to the model, we can call go a step further and call the 5 cooperating cells More Complex than the five individual cells. To make this possible I introduced efficiency, where, working at 100% efficiency, the cooperating cells produce 125 units of chemical and at 40% efficiency they produce 50 units. These five cells are all legal down to 20% efficiency, and so they have 80 legal states, while five individual cells have only one legal state (at 100% efficiency).

We are now looking at a tradeoff. Where, as individuals, the cells are robust to separation and are individually more complex, the cooperating cells are individually simpler and collectively more complex than individualized competitors. At intermediate levels of cooperation, we will see robustness and efficiency slide past each other.

The economy exponent provides the incentive to scale up. It provides an incentive for higher scale organization. Not only does this exponent control the extent to which cooperation gets rewarded, my preliminary poking around indicates that it has influence over how 'plantlike' or 'animallike' a collective of units is. Really! But I won't go into the work that shows it until you respond to this initial work.

So, in summary, this model provides a way to analyze changes in complexity of a simple system over changes in scale. It also provides a way to analyze plantlikeness and animallikeness. It also emphasizes that there are different kinds of robustness (robust to being separated or to being starved) and forces a rigorous definition of modular (are the specialized cells modules because they are specialized, or are the individual cells modules because they are self sufficient?). Both of these concepts are far too butchered in everyday discussion of ideas like this, and the model shows some of the nuance in them.

Also, this discussion only looked at the extreme ends of the spectrum, full collectiveness and individualness, but the intermediate points on the spectrum are ripe. By digging around I've seen how plantlikeness and animallikeness are meaningless distinctions at economies of one, in an intuitive way. It has also shown me how the more complex an individual cell is (the more parts it has), the more it will be animallike.

Creation: Case Closed

The Earth was created here:


Google Earth has a better shot of it, the exact spot is within 500 meters of these coordinates: 39°39'21.59"N 121°49'49.12"W. That is 5.5 miles south of Chico, CA, home of party town USA and the Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. Also, former home of the indigenous and not extinct Maidu people. I learned years ago that the raft from which the earth was created was grounded at Ta'doiko, and in this post I gave my first stab at finding the place. As you can see, I was way off, my guess was that it would be a prominent mountain top, it turns out to be the opposite, just a spot in the floodplain of the Sacramento River, Lassen Peak turns out to have been just a northern border of their territory. Whatever was once at Ta'Doiko (like the legendary tree Hu'kiimtsa that grew 12 different kinds of acorns) is now long gone, and fertilizer for whatever orchards and fields you can make out in that map. I found the place with google's invaluable help, they scanned Alfred Kroeber's 1925 Indians of California (from which the Maidu of the link above took much of their information) which, amazingly had a slightly different spelling of Ta'doiko labeled on a map, here, page 446.

Since I was on such a roll, I decided to find another place place mentioned in the complete version of the story than the one I blogged.

Marysville Buttes is where the spirits of the dead go to eat spirit food. Again, the internet is amazing for the resources it could provide. I found the entire history of the NGS's markers, and one mentioning that the marker formerly locating Marysville Buttes has its carving scratched out and renamed Sutter Buttes ( I later found that Wikipedia says the same thing, and the first google hit for marysville buttes is sutter buttes). The history of the marker went back to 1876. This holy site later became the staging ground for many of General Fremont's attacks on the Natives and Mexicans who were in charge of California at the time. It even later, and more provokingly, became an ICBM missle storage facility. How's that for spirit food? Marysville Buttes is here, just a few miles south of Ta'doiko.

There is more to that story Ku'ksuu, the first man must be what the Kuksu cult is named after. The Kuksu Cult is best called a religion, and it spanned at least a dozen different langauge communities and tribes spanning from the Sierras to the Bay area and south as far as Bakersfield, I think. I also think Father-of-Secret-Society is a representative of teh Kuksu Cult (its also called a secret society) and got 'written in' at some point by the old story tellers.

The world began off the Durham-Dayton Highway, near Fimple Road. Case closed.

I am Either Above or Below the Golden Rule

I've recently determined that I should not use the Golden Rule, 'do unto others as you would have them do unto you', in determining the appropriateness of my social interactions. The problem comes because I interact with people who have different boundaries and standards than me, and things that I wouldn't mind others doing unto me are often things that others would not do or want done to them. It also happens the other way around, I might percieve that someone violated the Golden Rule in interacting with me when really they were working within their bounds. So, because most of my interactions are with people who have very different boundaries than me, the Golden Rule is not so helpful in determining what is right. If most of the people you deal with are similar to you, then the Rule still works.

As far as replacing it, it has always been just one of many heuristics I use in guiding my interactions, but I have toyed with versions like 'Do unto others as they do unto themselves', hopefully I won't get backed into the informationless 'Do unto others as they would have you do unto them'