sub inter mutandis

Edmund Leach writes a ghastly description of religious practices of the Kachins. "The supreme manifestation of this is when a woman dies in childbirth; such a woman is deemed to be a witch of the most noxious kind and in former days all the possessions of her husband's household, including the house itself, had to be burnt so as to disinfect the community". His work is challenging, as in you have to look something up about once a page. He is fond of using Latin such as sub specie aeternitatis, mutatis mutandis, inter alia. You could make yourself an excellent vocabulary building word list by going through Leach and listing the words you do not know. I may do just that.

I have a recipe for sigil construction which has garnered much praise, and one person even used the method to design a tatoo for themself. It is based on a method that was probably invented the week after they invented letters back in the Levant in the beginnings of the Iron Age. First you begin with your spell. (I have never used this spell, but it will serve to illustrate the method.)

I intend to shag Angelina Jolie.

Rewrite this with all duplicate letters omitted:

Inteoshaglj

Capitalize:

INTEOSHAGLJ

Now strike all duplicate strokes; for example the T contains the I; the E and N contain the H:

NTEA OSGJ (Also I have separated the letters containing curvature from the ones that do not.)

Now fire up your word processor. Type the OSGJ in 70 or 80 point font, one letter per page, with a different pastel color for each letter--pink, light orange, yellow, light green, &c. Type the NTEA in 70 or 80 point font, one letter per page, the lightest gray you have got. Now print the letters all on top of each other. Print the first letter, put the printout back into the feeder tray; print the second letter, put the printout back into the feeder tray. And so on.

Now you have a sigil you can use as you please. I have four of these and I cycle through them to give me a different intention to be mindful of every fourth day. You can mount them on poster stock, or the way I have done is to use some styrofoam poster board cut up into four inch squares. Lastly do not tell anybody what your sigil is, what it signifies, not a word. Supposedly part of the magic is that this is a secret you take to your grave.

hypomnemata, hypnerotomachia, handycrafts

As the final item in my socioeconomics crash course I began in October 2008 I read the Foucault Reader which was compiled by the anthropologist Paul Rabinow. His work is a little too far beyond anything I can use, but it's good for defining that boundary. I have read him before but Rabinow's editing gave a different impression. He comes across as having been a sad man. I always knew he was comical, but I never realized he may have been so partly because he was so profoundly sad. He used a word I had to look up, hypomnemata; and if you google on hypomnemata the top hits are Foucault stuff. In other words this may be more his imagination than any fact.

The hypomnema or hypomnemata are similar to diaries (or weblogs even) except they are not written one time and maybe never looked at again. They are to be reread and rewritten over and over for the writer's education and work and progress. I have been doing a bunch of this for years and it is only since November of 2008 that I have established a system that I am confident of using daily and feel that the pages will continue to contain useful information for five or more years. Every page is dated and numbered. I now have close to 1500 pages with the numbering scheme. Foucault claims this is a great idea and I don't know about that but so far I like it OK.

For fun I have been reading The Pagan Dream of the Renaissance by Joscelyn Godwin and it is a trip. He looks at the arts culture in late 15th and 16th century Italy with a view that the ultimate work is the novel and woodcuts Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, which apparently we are not even certain who wrote it or made the woodcuts. Godwin has a lot of amusing speculative history which is similar in spirit to the way that Foucault did it. For example he has magic spell interpretations of the court ritual musical pieces such as Le Pellegrina, music for the wedding of Ferdinado de Medici and Christine de Lorraine, Florence, 1589. He has magic spell interpretations of the architecture of the Palace at Versailles. He reports that Louis XIV was an initiate of a Pythagorean secret society.

It does not take much imagination to concoct a magic spell interpretation for the Sacro Bosco in Barmozo. That place looks Satanic even on the wikipedia or google image search pages.

An interesting character is the Venetian artist Andrea Mantegna. Godwin surmises that it was a member of Mantegna's shop, but absolutely not the great man himself, who did the Hypnerotomachia woodcuts. He also has a chapter almost entirely dedicated to the Mantegna tarochi, and again, concludes those cards were painted by a member of Mantegna's shop but not by the great one himself.

For my handicraft project this week I constructed a meditation device out of a set of Mantegna tarochi images. It is on an 11" by 17" piece of printer paper. Ten points in the shape of the Holy Kabbalah Tree of Life. The ten points connected by eight lines of black graphics tape in the lightning flash configuration. The ten points covered by half-size Mantegna tarochi images of: Grammatica, Artixan, Polimnia, Forteza, Theologia, Philosofia, Fede, Mercurio, Musicha, and Saturno. I have used it a couple times and it works pretty swell!

spring branch decision tree blog

The water moves into the roots of the tree up to the trunk of the tree out to the branches of the tree through the leaves of the tree. One of my internet pals asks me about the layoff and am I moving to Rochester as I had once planned? Short answer: maybe, not soon.

The long answer is too long to post here. I will try and hit the highlights. Since I have known about this for months, I had plenty of time to do as much soul searching and planning as I wanted to. It turns out I wanted to do quite a bit. I used two texts: What Color is your Parachute? and Sam Keen's Your Mythic Journey. The parachute book is obvious and it is the gold standard of career consulting handbooks for good reason. A large portion of the book is a self-examination of strengths, weaknesses, likes, and dislikes so you can make this important decision from an informed point of view. Bolles names this the flower exercise. I did not do Bolles' flower exercise. As a substitute for this I did the similar and more comprehensive writing exercise that is the bulk of Keen's book.

I have a four main branch, (5, 3, 4, 1) small branch decision tree after all that, and one of the small branches is U. Rochester and moving and I may do that. A priori I would say the chances of that are around one in thirteen. The four main branches in the tree are:

I. get another seismic job
II. go back to school
III. start my own business
IV. chuck it all

(i.e. it looks like this but details omitted because absolutely nobody is going to want to see all the self absorbed narcissistic minutia:
I. A.B.C.D.E.
II. A.B.C.
III. A.B.C.D.
IV.)

Each branch has its pluses, minuses. The biggest plus for getting another seismic job is that the opportunity cost for not doing so appears very large. That is more of a double negative than a positive so obviously it is not the greatest idea. I may do it anyway, but first I am going to explore the rest of the tree deliberate.

What I am most drawn to is starting my own business. This has the advantages of liberty and control freaky freak on. Supposedly I have some issues with authority. No doubt there is some deep seated Freudian origin for this which might fascinate some, but it does not fascinate me. I consider it a possible environmental boundary condition. And if I work for myself it does not even exist. At least my childhood was not as miserable as Michel Foucault's apparently was:

"Humanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination."

-- Nietzsche, Genealogy, and History

The business I am working to create involves an unsolved physics problem. My first task is to refresh and reload my physics expertise with an intense course; first Feynman, next Landau and Lifshitz. If my business plan turns out to not fly, this effort is fully worthwhile for all eight of the minor branches in major branches I and II and mostly worthwhile for the other three minor branches in major branch III. In New Orleans they call this lagniappe and at West Point this is known as covering your flank.

The appeal of Rochester used to be stronger. The University of Rochester, due to Max Eastman's endowment and Emil Wolf's genius, is the center of the optical physics universe. When I was studying optics at the University of New Orleans, I might have been the only person in the program who could get an American military secrets security clearance, and my goal was the Navy laser lab at China Lake. This was before the war on terror and the rude reawakening that I still do not have the stomach to work on weapon systems. I love optical physics. Waging war on Arabs and Persians makes me want to puke.

When I visited Rochester in the spring of 2007 both the professors I spoke to said that there was a fellow at Rice University I need to meet. I can do all the optical physics that I want and stay in Texas. I may go to Rochester eventually. A sound strategic plan includes exclusions. For example I no longer plan on winning a grand slam tennis tournament or shagging a Hollywood movie star. Those items are now excluded from the decision tree. Rochester remains included for now and at least a little further.

running from medusa to a perpetual motion machine

My new project is a perpetual motion machine. Not exactly that, but close enough for all practical purposes. If I achieve even ten percent of my intention, I can afford to rent a private jet to fly a smoking hot babe across the country to see a total eclipse of the sun in 2017 and not even blink when I sign the bill. That is the most extravagant thing I would ever care to do--hence to me I am inventing a perpetual motion machine for all my practical purposes. My first full day at work was OK. Before I get to that (including a couple of wondrous tidbits if you hang in there dear Reader) I am going to back up and cover medusa.

I found out I was getting laid off pretty much for sure the second week December and Wednesday was my last day. This means for first three months 2010 my office has reeked of the carrion of my dead corporate career. The hazard in that is most succinctly described in Bronislaw Malinowski: Magic, Science and Religion. His Trobrianders describe a creature, which he calls mulukuausi, and is elsewhere described as the Melanesian Medusa. She hunts humans and is aroused by the aroma of carrion. Whenever Malinowski was walking through the forest on Trobriand Island and the natives smelled carrion, they immediately performed complex rituals for protection from the mulukuausi. The mulukuausi is described as female which is its main physical similarity to the medusa. Snakes for hair is not mentioned anywhere that I know of.

I have been daily performing protection rituals to diffuse the carrion taint, which is why I claim I am fleeing medusa. Yesterday I did a tarot spread. It was informative. I drew all fire and water cards--it was a good spread for ritual cleansing. The key message I took was from the seven cups in position seven. My interpretation of this card is beware worshiping false gods. Very similar to the first of the commandments in Exodus: Thou shalt have no other god before me. I don't have to worry about elevating tarot. And I certainly do not have to worry about elevating my upwardly mobile corporate career. Not any more. I suppose my main concern in this regard is excessive elevation of my magnificent intellect.

God I swear I crack myself up. Maybe the card was referring to my inappropriate expressions of humor.

My big smarty ego may be quickly cured by step One in my new project which is working through the Feynman Lectures on Physics one by one at least to Volume III Lecture 21. That is the last lecture that I have on tape. I do not have them all on tape. There are around 150 and I have 60. Yesterday I read five lectures and listened to two. I have tried this sub-project a couple times before and not gotten far, but both of those times I was doing it the other way around. Attempts one and two were centered around working through the 60 recordings, anchored back on to the 60 corresponding printed lectures. Printed lecture four is recorded lecture 25 and I never got that far before.

He has, by odd coincidence, a discussion of perpetual motion machines in this lecture. He has a machine which may be more complex than necessary to demonstrate his point, and I thought the argument a bit Baroque, like one of those goofy picture frames that has angels blowing trumpets carved into the top corners. He says his argument (following from Carnot) is ingenious, but just because an argument is ingenious does not mean it is correct. If it does not agree with the experiments, the argument is wrong. This argument does happen to agree with the experiments, and it demonstrates that perpetual motion machine impossibility and energy conservation are two ways of saying the same thing. At the end of the lecture he points out how little watery Hydrogen is necessary for nuclear fusion energy amounting to all the coal, oil and gas, &c. we are currently burning and he challenges physicists to liberate humanity from energy limits.

My project is partly an unsolved physics problem so I appreciate the sentiment, but it does not yet involve nuclear fusion energy production.

The most interesting thing about the recordings is the man's audio presentation. He had a strong working class New York accent which he had not done much to modify at the point when the lectures were recorded in 1961. He sounded like a Looney Tunes character: Bugs or Foghorn Leghorn or Sylvester Cat or perhaps some hybrid of the three. There is no doubt in my mind that Mel Blanc could have done a splendid Richard Feynman rap. If I can continue at five lectures a day I can have a good time with this for the next thirty days. Maybe I will mix in some Looney Tunes videos to break it up.

That's all folks!

fairytale of turkey creek

Once upon a time a man, nearly my identical twin, had an office and a job at a great office park by Turkey Creek. Working late past sunset on the summer solstice he took a short break to walk among the trees. There appeared before him in the moonlight a ghost of a centuries dead Karankawa hunter, tall and broad and near naked. The ghost spoke to him of secrets, of a treasure, and of a curse. My near-twin respects curses, likes treasures, and can keep secrets, so he attended well to that Karnkawa's tales. They parted in peace and my near-twin returned to his office and to his computer. It might have freaked out a few people to see this ghost, or maybe more what the ghost said, but he it did not faze. He has seen stranger things even than that I have been told.

Time passed with no more sign of Karankawas, ghosts, curses, or treasures. And my near-twin kept the Karankawa's secrets. Early one Saturday morning near the end of the summer he was walking through the Addicks Reservoir across the fence from the Turkey Creek offices. A large hawk with a red tail called to him from the branch of a birch tree. And then it spoke in perfect English, "when you see or hear something you do not understand, then and there is where you dig for gold. That is how it has always been done. Never forget the predominance of poverty amongst gold prospectors."

That is a lot of English syllables for a hawk and so my near-twin decided it was not a hawk. Gold is a treasure and poverty a curse and pursuing what you do not understand sounded oddly parallel to the Karankawa ghost's secrets from months before. As he turned away to walk back to the car the hawk called to his back: "shepherd who goes, up by the sheepcotes, if you should happen to see, the one I most desire, tell him I sicken suffer and die".

That night he dreamt. He was a boy in a Shaolin monastary with a shaved head and an old blind monk said to him "when you can walk silent across the raised floor in your office at Turkey Creek, it will be time for you to leave". This was what Jung's Elgeyo medicine man described as a Big Dream, such as they no longer had since the white man had come to Africa. It also sounded quite a bit like the secret of the Karankawa ghost, except no it was not that exactly either.

There was one last natural wonder in my near-twin's mysterious year. There are two great poplar trees outside his office window, and in December the air became cold and all the leaves on the poplars turned bright red overnight. One day they were green and losing their hue. The next morning there were tens thousands bright crimson red poplar leaves. And three days later they all fell onto the ground. Need I add that this also was eerily reminiscent of one of the secrets of the Karankawa ghost, except of course it was not exactly that either.

zombies

I went through a pile of Social Network Theory stuff this week. It was an accident. Some dude on the internet wrote a spoof paper "How many zombies do you know?" which had a spoof reference list. Except one of the references was a gold mine.

Zheng, Salganik, & Gelman "How many people do you know in prison? Using overdispersion in count data to estimate social structure in networks".

The paper is not easy to read closely. From Zheng et al's reference list I found solutions to a couple of problems which have been bothering me. How to deal with being stigmatized being the biggie. I am going on sabbatical. The timing of this is chosen by my employer, which is axing ten percent world wide, axing twenty percent in my pay grade, axing my project, and axing my position. Within my field which has funded my fortune are folks who are going to view me as possessing the stigma of being laid off. Thirty-eight percent of them will, to be precise.

It turns out this problem has been exhaustively researched by sociologists and psychologists. The earliest cite I found was Osgood and Richard, "From yang and yin to and or but" from 1973. Osgood apparently coined the description "golden section" after the golden ratio in ancient Greek geometry. 1 : .616 which are the proportions of the edifice of the Parthenon, for example. There is a trove of material on google scholar with many examples and themes. The most interesting of which is that we may even have an essential brain circuit for sorting whatever we encounter in our environment, such that we find 62 percent of it appealing at a subconscious lever and 38 percent of it unappealing.

Stigma is specifically analyzed within this paradigm in Raskin, Harasym, Mercuri, and Widrick, "Construing stigmatized identities: a golden section study". The most stigmatized are the homeless and the mentally ill. They are looked down upon even more harshly than criminals. Criminals are of only slightly lower status than politicians. It was not clear whether we should laugh or cry about this last finding. I did neither but merely noted it.

The quantities appear vulnerable to book cooking and perhaps it is all a complete cockup of bias and circular reasoning. To me it makes intuitive sense about much which I find interpersonally puzzling. It is useful to me to consider that those 38 percent looking down on me are biologically determined and irrelevant to my self, person, employability, &c. Even if it is fictitious, it is be a useful fiction. And I have reams of research to back me up. Science.

I also read a couple of papers by the sociologist Nan Lin. Professor Lin has done Social Network Theory analysis around the old proverb: "it isn't what you know; it is who you know", quantifying social capital. For my occupation schmoozing is of little relevance. It is better to have some competence in it than a complete lack, but beyond a certain small ante it really does not matter. If I skim The Economist weekly and know some Houston restaurants I am good to go. These guys have no interest in tunas with good taste, but they appreciate it if you can give them a pointer for how to find some tuna that tastes good.

One of my severance benefits is consulting service from a headhunter firm. They are collecting a small fee to help me polish my resume and refine my interviewing skills, then they plan to collect another fee once they succeed in facilitating my passage into the maw of some hypothetical next employer. I do not think I am going to give them the time of day. According to Nan Lin and his colleagues' meticulous research, my list credentials is basically it. My credentials are fine. If I want another job I am not going to have trouble finding one. I am not sure yet that I do want another job.

One troubling comment in one of Lin's papers did not seem essential to his claims, but was more like editorializing on us who work for a living. He wrote we invariably have a value or an ethic that any time spent not working is wasted. I am going to take a minimum six months off. I will use the time quite usefully.

I also read a Social Network Theory analysis of how sex transmitted diseases transmit. If you are curious how all those people we know got the herpes, you can find it in ghoulish detail in Kretzschmar and Morris, "Measures of concurrency in networks and the spread of infectious disease". It is worth reading. One of the papers I did waste time on was a Social Network Theory analysis of how facebook and twitter became internet behemoths. If you see me writing about my brand, please ignore it. Lastly a sad true fact: I do know one person in prison.

thus spake sartorithustra

Sartoris was Colonel in the Confederate Army from Yoknapatawpha County. After the Civil War the place was devastated--property destroyed, the leadership discredited, young men killed and maimed, the socioeconomic system turned upside down trying to resurrect itself into viability, and a heavy burden of racism. The leading men of the County were cruel and dishonest as they could be with a legal system which was slack regarding their skullduggery.

About a month ago I had coffee with a man whose great great grandfather was an officer in the Confederacy who died at the Battle of Vicksburg. He told us a story about him laying there wounded, knowing he was dying, and writing a last letter to his son. Drops of great great grandpa's blood on the pages. A message about honor and decency and integrity, about what matters most of all. The fellow speaking to us was not from Yoknapatawpha County, but his father might just as well have been. The man's father is a native of northern Mississippi, and what happened to Faulkner's fictional county after the Civil War was widespread through that entire region. The letter is still in the family; an older cousin considers it the family's most precious keepsake and will pass it to his oldest son.

While the man was telling us this story at coffee, he was deeply moved. Others of us were moved. I was not moved. I was thinking about Will Varner in The Hamlet, passing time at the ruin of the old Frenchman's place, telling curious passersby,

"I wonder what would drive a man to think he needs to own all this crap."

The irony is that Will Varner is more acquisitive even than Flem Snopes; and Flem Snopes' barnburning escapades were nothing on the scale of skullduggery to which Will Varner ascended.

My father's hometown is not a topic I ever use with acquaintances. Never. Apparently the storyteller at coffee saw fit to consider us intimate friends. I changed the subject. I talked about this guy we all know who participates in Civil War battle reenactments. Aristotle tells us there are three types of friends.

First there are friends with benefits. Aristotle did not mean the modern usage--those would fall into category two. Friends with benefits are people who help you move, let you borrow their truck, sell you their childrens' fund-raising candy bars. You do me a favor. I'll do you a favor. That is Aristotle's meaning of friend, benefits.

Secondly there are friends with whom you share pleasures. Friends you go to coffee with. Drink beers. Dance. &c. Friends, pleasure. Your modern friend with benefits would be a friend, pleasure.

Aristotle's third and highest form of friendship is based upon virtue. The rare person is such a fine example of a human being and your relationship with them is such that they inspire you to be your best.

That guy at coffee was trying to make a friendship III maneuver. He was trying that by way of his family's story about a horrible war and pointless premature personal death. My mind is still boggled. I am not going for coffee with him again any time soon. In case you are wondering, this was a group of employees. My coworkers. Yes I read that diatribe on slashdot,

"Didn't you guys learn anything from Steve Jobs and Bill Gates? You do not have friends at work."

I do not agree with the slashdot ranter. You can have friends at work. It is identical to any other environment in this respect: some of the people there have boundary problems. You only have to avoid the people with boundary problems, just like you have to avoid those people everywhere else you go.

job interview

This week I had my first job interview in eleven years. Part of it I aced. Part of it I bombed.

I may not really want the job that much. If my next job interview is for a job I really want it was good practice. I am reminded of an old hacker maxim: make one to throw away. One of my favorite programmers says that this is completely wrong; replace it with: never throw anything away! But I digress.

The part I bombed was the interviewer's question on leadership. I was trying to say my preferred style of leadership is to lead by example; unfortunately that came out as lead by doing and I could not even stumble upon what I was trying to say. If it was useful to the interviewer to find out I lack imagination for leadership, I gave him precisely the information he needed by omission.

Later I was going through the meatball wiki and found a much better recipe. This seems to be from some Taoists or other related eastern philosophy. Leadership is ideally done by heart, by hand, by mind. First by heart; nobody is going to follow you unless they perceive some authentic empathetic listening on your part. Second by hand; this is leading by example and is only secondary to the first requirement. So, even my attempted answer would have been lacking. Third by mind; this is where you create solutions to problems. All three necessary, and in that exact priority order.

The question I had to think about after bombing that part of the interview is how this leadership issue affects my worthiness, my golden resume, and my job aspirations. I did lead on my last project successfully, by example, with hand and with mind. There was very little of what the Taoists would describe as heart in it. There has been little of what the Taoists would describe as heart in any of my professional endeavors. Perhaps that is an impossibility given the economy, my industry and management culture at my employer.

My non-work works in the past year have been successful without qualifications. I wrote 1000 pages; made my glossy brochure; invented two meditation techniques; read a decent library shelf filled with books on finance and investment and economics; made a number of frameable artworks. These activities were all done passionately. My job has been fine but definitely at a lower level of emotional engagement. Perhaps the relationships have been a burden and not energizing. My bosses view me as introverted, aloof. It is possible they think I am apathetic. The question may be moot here and now but maybe deserves attention at my next job.

I don't know.

can of worms

Why are geologists so conservative about accepting new ideas?

This is a rhetorical question asked on the metafilter weblog by user russilwvong. It got me to thinking about three separate ideas I have encountered over the course of many years of studying earth science, and I believe they are similar, connected, and fascinating. And relevant to his question even if they do not completely answer it.

Idea one: continental drift and plate tectonics.

Continental drift as an idea dates back over a hundred years and the convexity of Brazil fitting perfectly into the concavity of the Gulf of Guinea off west Africa surely stimulated the imagination of the first geologically inclined thinkers who saw the first accurate maps. Alfred Wegener assembled data in the early 20th century correlating South American and African geological data but the smoking gun was the discovery in 1958 of magnetic striping on the sea floor of the Atlantic Ocean showing unambiguously that the ocean plates were spreading outward.

The data was first analyzed by a man named Morley and his papers were rejected as crack pottery and shortly after Vines and Matthews succeeded in getting the result into publication. When Peter Wyllie published The Way the Earth Works in 1971 he had a section titled "how Morley was screwed by the establishment" in his discussion of what was then described as the "Vines-Matthews hypothesis". I was surprised this morning when I loaded the wikipedia that their page as of now is entitled the Morley-Vines-Matthews hypothesis. The jargon changed when I was not looking at some point between 1985 (when I first read Wyllie's book) and 2009.

When I learned earth science my teachers were from the generation that grew up ignorant of plate tectonics and they had firsthand experience of reality shifting underneath them like the plates colliding along the San Andreas fault. Idea two and idea three in my little post here are more recent ideas, which appear to have become consensually accepted; however what interests me (not entirely accepting either) is the viewpoints of three men of that previous generation, which they shared with me in passing when we discussed them, as best as I recall.

Idea two: the Chicxulub anomaly meteor impact cretaceous extinction event.

I first heard about this in the 1980's, and I asked the smartest geologist I personally knew what he thought about it. At this point all the data we had was a circular potential field anomaly in Yucatan and an anomalous iridium rich stratum in one formation in the mountains in Italy. With this paltry amount of data geologists were talking to Scientific American and the New York Times and proclaiming we finally figured out what killed off the dinosaurs. My inside expert's opinion of the claims: maybe. His opinion of the publicity: grandstanding.

There has since been much work done on the Chicxulub structure and it really does look like a huge meteorite smacked into the Yucatan at around the time the dinosaurs died. Oh, and some other guys found some even larger circular anomalies they think have synchronous dating in the Indian Ocean. It is difficult to get clear cut answers when you are examining events that are from millions of years ago. The last time I spoke to a really smart geologist (of my generation) about the subject he stated: Chicxulub meteor impact structure equals Cretaceous extinction event, scientific fact.

Idea three: anthropogenic global warming.

This is the topic I was discussing on the metafilter weblog when russilwvong asked why are geologists so conservative? I first heard about this in the 1990's and read about it where and when I could. In 1999 I was at a summer school in Palo Alto and one of the teachers mapped ocean currents and computed ocean dynamic models. He seemed like he would have an expert opinion on anthropogenic global warming, so on a break and on a whim I asked him about it. He said we are warming up and carbon dioxide was increasing in the atmosphere and the claims about a direct causal relationship were not conclusive and the loudest claimants were not objective and not the best scientists.

At that time the most detailed models I had seen did not even account for cloud albedo so what he told me was in line with what I thought he might say. He has since been publicly embarrassed for criticizing the anthropogenic global warming research community and retracted all public criticisms. He has been corrected, or he has been silenced; I doubt he would tell me if it was the latter.

A couple of years later I had a short conversation with a man at the top of my own specialty on the subject. He had an interesting perspective. He told me when he first became aware of anthropogenic global warming, he went to the library and grabbed everything he could find and stacked it up on a table. He spent eight hours going through as much of the research as he could. After eight hours he decided he was not qualified to have an opinion on the subject.

He did not answer my question about anthropogenic global warming, but he taught me one of the most valuable lessons of all. The Socratic maneuver.

Agnosticism is irrefutable.

shemhamphorasch dream

I have a recipe for dream work which is simple and works about 66% of the time.

1. get up 1.0 - 2.0 hours early
2. take a double dose caffeine (2 cups coffee if you regularly take 1)
3. read or work or workout for an hour until fully alert
4. meditate maximum (I go for a good hour)
5. sleep and dreams are likely vivid and memorable
6. record

I last did this successfully on Friday. I dreamt about an ex-girlfriend who wanted me to buy a lot in a rural area for 72000 $.
Then I dreamt of a dog which had human intelligence and spoke and did not like the stormy weather outside. It was not storming in the real world while I was dreaming this.
Then I dreamt I was constructing a pentagon pentagram figure and trying to figure out the angles inside the pentagon, attempting to divide 360 by 5. I could not perform this calculation inside the dream. In that state the problem was intractable. I woke to the answer: 72. This was an aha positive emotion strong.

72 is an important number in Kabbalah. There is a 72 word long name for God, the shemhamphorasch which is constructed by taking three verses in Exodus and lining them up forward, reversed, forward and reading the three letters in each column as one of the 72 words. There is a story from Talmud time that this 72 word name of God is a magical word, that it is the word said by Moses when he parted the Red Sea, the word said by Ezekiel when he had his chariot vision, the word said by Elijah when he was lifted up straight into heaven, the word said by Daniel when he tamed the lions, &c.

I did not dream of the shemhamphorasch, exactly. But I did dream about 72.