Sapience

I finally got to see Return of the King last night. My reaction--- decent movie, like the first and second, but I was spoiled by having read and loved the books first.

Going to be out of touch for a few days due to family business and returning to Nebraska.

I was trying to help someone with a calculus problem, and got stuck on it. Got the right symbols in the wrong combination: a sign change and a couple of factors of two in inconvenient places. He's been working on it, too, and is similarly stuck. This is going to bug me until I get it right.

I got bitten by a virus last year when I got an unexpected e-mail that I thought was from someone I knew, and opened the attachment. So, when I get five e-mails with attachments from people whose addresses I don't recognize and with no clue about their contents, do I trust them? No, I do not. I'm getting traffic from spammers and bots... Maybe in another month or so, if traffic levels on my site keep going up, someone real will say hello.

I managed to corner a professor of philosophical logic about my three-valued version. It's not really his area of interest (I've heard that song before), and he says that before it's publishable, I need to make a solid case for why people should pay attention to it. Apparently, without seeing it, he thinks I need to do more research, and isn't really interested enough to offer to read and comment on it. I know I would like to do more research, but somehow, if my description doesn't interest people enough to even read my paper...I feel like I'm trying to ignite a log with a match.

Certainly, there is nothing that can be all things to all people. That's not what I'm trying to do with my developments in logic. It would suffice if it were more things to more people than the systems that are already developed. But I can't address objections if I don''t know what they are. I suppose this is why I need to do more research.

Something he said put me in mind of the compartmentalization of academic areas. Compartments have walls, or barriers between them. I seriously, and I mean seriously dislike these. It's inevitable that they exist, but I'm a strong believer in seeing things from as many different sides as possible. Human beings aren't bees or ants and aren't born to classes or castes, and I don't think they should be educated or trained into them, either.

Finally got a round of updates to the site: that's a weight off my mind. Even though my deadlines are self-imposed, it's stressful when I don't meet them. I owe it to visitors to make the site worth visiting.

That was part of the stress-causing unfinished business, and I addressed some of the other unfinished business, so the stress is back to bearable levels.

I might as well comment on some of the ideas that my work is bringing up. One of the problems with relying on any single source for information is that one tends to adopt the biases of that source. There are several sources I can use for influential people, and all of them have biases of one kind or another. For one, people who have lived recently and events that have occurred recently haven't had the time to influence as many people as older ones. To those with a nodding acquaintance with history, some quite influential individuals are conspicuous by their absence.
This shows up particularly when I break these down by peoples and nations. Many of the familiar figures of history of the US, Britain, France, Germany, etc. don't show up. Even basing history on biography has problems because important events or processes don't always have single leaders associated with them.
This list, like most others I have seen, is biased toward Western civilization. Important figures in China, India, and Africa, to name a few, hardly appear at all, and based on the number of peoples that are influenced, I would judge that they should be.
By including more events with economic impact, I have gone a ways toward redressing the weakness in that area, but education and families are seriously underrepresented.
Science includes a bias toward physics and physicists, although a strong case can be made for the idea that biology and earth science are more directly important in individual lives.
I want to finish out the Hart list of people for biographical entries, but the site is getting very close to a point where I can start bringing in other criteria for including people.

I've been watching the political fight in Iran, where the religious hard-liners disqualified many of the candidates for elective office, which could have led to the collapse of the government as ministers and even the president threatened to resign in protest. It looks like that is being averted.
Also, I would hope that the Iraqis will back off on the demand for early elections and accept the governing council as a temporary expedient: Less than ideal, but better than no government at all.

It looks like Kerry has a strong lead in the race for the Democratic nomination, with Iowa and New Hampshire. We'll see what happens next.

I didn't mention, but I did notice, that the second Mars rover has landed, and seems to be working well. It appears that the first one is in better shape than it was: the experts are tracking down the problem. Poorly tested control programs for hardware are a nice breeding ground for bugs.

Stress. Modern life is stressful in so many ways. Finding productive ways of meeting and resolving it is not always easy, but if I avoid it and let it build, I'm headed for a crashing depression, which will only mean, more stress later. Must find a better way to deal with stress.

Beign sick isn't fun, either: Nothing major, but multiple medium-level complaints have slowed me down the past few days. I brought copies of my website files with me so I can continue work on them between visits to family and friends and trips to the library, and got some updates accomplished. One of the friends I visited had seen the old site and commented that it was all outline and no content. Ouch...but I need critical comments just as much as praise. I sensed that, I think, and I'm trying to do better this time around.

24 hour bus trips are not my idea of fun. I don't sleep well sitting up in moving vehicles in cramped conditions. Almost as bad was the loud orc-talk among some of the upper teenage or so passengers. A few of them tried to buy a beer at one of our 15-minute rest stops: I didn't think that was such a good idea when I heard their plans, but didn't say anything. Apparently the bus company think it's a really BAD idea: A police officer showed up to ask who it was (no one wanted to admit it), and both that driver and the next announced that the next person who tried it would be staying behind. Not that there was much opportunity after that. Small towns in western Colorado and eastern Utah don't have much in the way of beer joints within a 5-minute walk of their bus stations after midnight. Fortunately.

The pattern of traffic that is showing up on my web site is indicating that the biographical listing is the most frequently accessed, followed by history. My daily average on visitors has been climbing steadily: If I can manage to get a site update while I am here, this should improve even more. I'm not sure what I need to do to pull lurkers in to comment, but a fair amount of what I would like to do requires interaction.
I've said it somewhere and I'll say it again: everybody else, collectively speaking, knows a whole lot more than I do or ever will.

I'm going to be visiting family in Utah for the next week and a half, so entries are going to be intermittent.

It's going to be difficult working on the site, also, since my internet access is uncertain and I may not be able to use all my tools, or have access to my references, but I'll do what I can.

Oh, I did finish rereading LOTR, and it's clearer why some people find it hard to read. But some of the things that make it difficult to read also make it profound. The Return of the King is going to be showing here while I'm gone...I hope to catch it there.

The martian rover's mission was going so well... I wonder what happened. Latest report I saw was that something was wrong with the rover itself, since it was sending random bits. It looks like the new Bush space plan is long on goals and direction but short on cash. But the perception has been that the Space program didnt' have a well defined goal and was accomplishing little except burning money. At least now there's a clearer direction, which should help. In the meantime, NASA is trying to use its white elephant (The shutle program) to finish the ISS and then get ride of it. For real progress in longer-term development, though, the X-prize is heating up: new developments are being reported on about a weekly basis.

More thoughts on self-education. I've been searching the net a little more carefully, and I am having difficulty finding much significant discussion of it. It looks like it would be a good idea to take some time to organize my thoughts on the subject.
One thing that schools do provide is organization, structure, and discipline, as well as certification that you have learned what you are supposed to have learned. That certification isn't always valid: One of the complaints about American education today is that the certification is disconnected from the learning; promotion and diplomas are social instead of based on learning. Somehow, it seems that there needs to be a better way of testing and examination, so that people can verify whether they really know what they think they do: Sometimes people know more, sometimes less.
I'm also very much interested in self-education as a way to break out of the cycle of poverty, for those who do not have the means to pay a teacher or the desire to be herded through a class. I don't believe that money or previous performance should hold a person back from learning all they are capable of doing. I expect I'll be doing more ranting on the pros and cons of schooling.
It's too bad that the home-schooling community seems to be a bit closed except to parents who are teaching their own children. Somehow, non-traditional education needs to broaden up and take advantage of more living resources. While pre-written curricula have an important place, they shouldn't block the possibility of finding living mentors.

At a certain point in construction of the knowledge base, there comes a time when I am pulled in different lines of development by different things: It's rather like untangling a ball of yarn composed of several different threads.: every attempt is inhibited by something else that hasn't been done yet. It's difficult to do independent development of things that are intimately connected. Progress feels a bit slow.

One of my comments that disappeared had to do with my thoughts on the difficulty of self-education. I tend to be interested in things that require specialist knowledge, such as the equations of motion for falling objects in a non-uniform gravitational field, the sublimation point of water in vacuum, the relationship of three-valued logic to modal logic, the history of russia's expansion into central Asia, to name just a few examples. I can find information on any of these subjects if I look for it hard enough, but I tend to get blank looks, "Huh?" "who cares", and "I'm busy, ask someone else" if I ask questions. And, If I share my interest in a subject, the same kinds of things happen.

At a certain point, self-education can be lonely; it would be nice to share my interest and opinions about the process and the difficulties. I'm a veteran of it; I know how to look things up by myself, and I don't need social approval for it: If I really want to know something badly, I can learn it, in spite of any obstacles. But I have to pick my battles: i can't do everything I think worth doing, not by myself.

I note with interest the flap over Microsoft.com vs. MikeRoweSoft.com. For what little my opinion is worth, I am definitely in favor of the small guy in this suit. M$ is creating a PR disaster for themselves: When someone can't use a derivative of his own name lest it infringe on a megacorporate trademark, that seems to be pushing trademark protection a bit too far. How much goodwill, and how much revenue, is this going to cost them, I wonder?

I also note that Howard Dean managed to trip over himself in Iowa. Apparently he got carried away with his own rhetoric, spoke more of his mind than was prudent, and in the process scared undecided voters away. The Presidental election will probably be already decided by the time I have a say in it, so it would probably be best to start paying attention to local congressional races.

I'm not sure whether it was the new pages I put up, or whether Google got around to indexing my pages, but I'm seeing more activity from the search engines. I'm encouraged; it's time to go back to work on it.

Someone on the WTM site was musing about whether to home school or find a tutor, and difficulties in getting her home-schooled child to study, which got me thinking about self-education versus formal schooling.
As a veteran at self-education, I have a respect for both. In many cases, formal schooling is preferable. Much like exploring a jungle...There be dragons (or crocodiles), and irritants, and traps, and hostile natives who suspect you of poaching, and so forth. The experienced self-educator learns the value (and limitations) of guides and maps. It can be more thorough, but is nearly always slower, to learn something without benefit of a teacher or a classroom.
On the other hand, in a classroom, you have a guide and a well-marked path, but you pay the price of being in a herd. Side trip, running ahead, and lagging behind are actively discouraged. In some cases, if the guide (teacher) sets a sufficiently brisk pace, those who are accustomed to a slower one have a hard time keeping up. Which is best, going to school or trying self-education? It depends.
I see that some of my posts have disappeared from the message board I've been visiting on the WTM site: I've been trying to participate in the discussion. I have a suspicion that the webmaster there is classifying any active mention of my own site as spam. Even leading questions are against the board rules. Even mentioning that I have information related to a question asked by another member...Poof.
I mean well, but there is so much suspicion and mistrust in the world...Perhaps one reason the Lone Stranger doesn't join the posse is because they feed him cold shoulder.

It's an interesting experience being on the other side of a google search: Judging from the dozen or so search strings my activity logs have reported, instead of having to sort through chaff, I am becoming the chaff people have to sort through! I can't be all things to all people, but activity is good. I'm still disappointed that no one has taken up my invitation to comment: I really do need the interaction and the feedback. Eventually, I hope, someone will see what they like or like what they see and take the trouble to say hello.

Finally, three days later than I meant to, I have a new round of updates to the site, a noticeable growth spurt, including about three times as many links to other sources on the Web. There's more about what I'm trying to do with it and why, and so on. It's starting to draw visitors and the search engines are starting to direct people to it. Each round of updates should make it a little bit better and a little bit more worth finding.

I really mean to add something to this blog every day, but sometimes things just don't quite work. Apart from working heavily on the web site, I've been rereading Lord Of The Rings. No, I haven't seen the Return of the King yet, but the word is it's impressive. I'm living in a small rural town with little opportunity to get out, and it hasn't made it here yet.
But I know someone who is reading it and having a hard time getting into it, so I thought I'd reread it and check my own impressios. (Have I mentioned that I'm a fast reader?)

My web site is an exercise in practical self education: I'm just getting started, trying to assimilate and understand what I am doing before I try to go more. I wanted to get another round of updates up today, but it looks like it isn't going to happen: I was working on concepts of self-education.

It frustrates me to see how many people have difficulty with math. Different people just think differently: I found algebra easy. I think part of the problem is that math is a multibranched, multithreaded subject and there are several ways to approach it, but in order to teach it in a class, textbook writers are forced to linearize it. Then, teachers teach the same subjects in the same order to different people, no two of whom are the same in their interest, ability, or previous preparation. No wonder people complain about it: this approach fits students about the same as "one size fits all" shoes.

There are a bunch of people on the Well Trained Mind site who are looking for Latin tutorials. Reasonable, since the book promotes very old fashioned education in the classics, something the American educational system has abandoned. CJ Cherryh just happens to have a latin tutorial on her web site. Unless you were a fan of hers, would YOU ever think to look for it there? I certainly wouldn't.
You never know when or where interesting connections are going to turn up.

Resaerching the internet. It drives my crazy, because the topics I'm interested in aren't quite exactly what I want to know. The way I organize material and think about it is just enough different from the way most people have done, that it's hard finding the exact keywords that turn up useful searches. Either there is too much information, or it's misdirected, or there isn't quite enough. This is why I'm building a guide and directory.

But there must be lots of people who are frustrated with looking things up on the Internet and finding the same kinds of problems...so how can I connect to those people and get them to ask questions:? Questions, the need to know, is what ought to drive development of my base. I can think of plenty on my own, but that's not what my quest is about...I'm groping for other people who are asking related questions.

My web site is developing slowly, because everything I have is linked to three or four other areas, and trying to make those links explicit on a web page is a lot slower than seeing them in my mind. It's crawling when I want to run!. Now, who was that mountain man who was mauled by a grizzly and crawled hundreds of miles to the nearest outpost...If I remember the story right? I'll have to look it up.

I've been busy for a couple of days, composing a letter. That's right, a letter. I can't seem to write an ordinary letter without writing and rewriting, composing and recomposing, cutting and pasting, trying to get it to say *exactly* what I want to say. Then I get disappointed when no one finds what I've worked so hard over, interesting enough to read or somment on.

So, while I'm laboring over this silly letter, time marches on and I don't get any web pages written, don't find places to publicize it, don't find any new links, let alone crude necessities like eating or sleeping.

It looks like my concern about the new space program about to be announced is shared: Wondaful, but how we gonna pay for it?
I've found a self-education site that has reasonably interesting discussion: It's mostly inhabited by home-schoolers, but that's good company if they'll tolerate me, so I'm going to add it to my favorites list here.

I In the barrage of people or things demanding our attention, what do we communicate by silence? I'm not talking about advertisements, or books or magazines. We routinely tune out what we are not interested in, and merchants don't take it personally. I'm not talking about personal communication, with people you know by name or face. What are you communicating when you don't respond? Anger? Helpless uncertainty? Boredom? Dismissal? How do you maintain a conversation with someone who doesn't respond?

I saw a newspaper column, which discussed the termination of the series "Sex in the City". The columnist said that this had nothing to do with morality, but then went on to discuss the pain of short-lived relationships, and that sex becomes nothing little more than a physical exercise, devoid of anything special or deeper meaning.
But this is one of the very reasons why sexual promiscuity is considered immoral! It invades and destroys one of the things that makes marriage intimate and even sacred, and has a confusing and destructive effect on all other relationships.

Somewhat related to this was another article, quoting a state legislator who supports human cloning. To the objection that cloning would tend to diminish what is sacred about human life, he replied that that's a religious argument, suggesting that he doesn't accept it. Does this mean, then, that there is nothing sacred, nothing special, nothing different about human life that needs to be treated differently than a rock or a lump of coal? I don't want this person making laws I have to live under, because that which diminishes the worth of human life diminishes me.

I notice that a mosque was bombed in Iraq; and blamed by some Iraqis on the Americans and Israelis. "It is impossible that Moslems should do this" commented one. Unfortunately, it's not so impossible. I have no doubt that the majority of Iraqis would want to blow up mosques, any more than Jews want to blow up synagogues or Americans blow up churches. But there is still that hate-filled minority who cannot abide the presence of those who believe differently than they do, and wish to compel others to conform to their will through secret acts of destruction and murder.
There is a leak that President Bush intends to announce a bold new initiative in the Space program. I find myself with mixed feelings about it. It's all to the good to propose giving new life to the space program by setting forth new goals, but at the same time I'm worried about the price tag. In a period of ballooning budget deficits, can we afford it?
My RLV link can be followed to a discussion about this initiative: I tend to agree with those who believe that NASA would do best at the big projects, such as a return to the moon or visits to Mars, while access to low earth orbit should become the realm of private companies. But, as one observer commented on the recent flight of Rutan's Space Ship One as it reached Mach 1 "That's 1 down, 24 to go".
I'm still working on the knowledge base: A new round of updates just went up. I'm not satisfied with the look of it, but this should improve as I develop the content.

Skipped a day due to a trip out of town. I've been working heavily on my knowledge base, since it's comparatively just a seedling of what I want it to be. I tend to be extremely reserved about putting myself forward, so even though I know it's necessary to start actively publicizing my efforts, it's difficult to do so. I've started with gathering history sites, and once again I'm reminded of why specialists with a good head start can do more in their particular areas than a generalist like me. History links will appear on my knowledge base, and some of them are much better than mine is ever likely to be.
The only real excuse for mine is that it provides ordered and structured links to non-historical specialties.
My approach to learning that you should start from what you do know and build on it, and since there is such a wide variety of what people already know, and since everything is interconnected, there is a need to be comprehensive. Since The Event of the Year didn't happen in the last couple of days, I'm going to forego commentary on the news, and look at other stuff. My analysis of history started digging into the 19th century, and the last person on my list with significant contributions turned out to be Marconi, inventor of wireless telegraphy, which got me started wondering what happened to his company. Like many other topics, I'm going to have to set this aside.
My Google search of self education turned up a couple of interesting links: Autodidactic press, and the Self Education Foundation.

I was watching the efforts of Afghanistan to get a constitution approved: it seems that a version has made it through their convention without that breaking up, which is one hopeful sign. I hope it works. Meanwhile, I see miscellaneous reports that the resistance in Iraq is slowing down; the rate of causualties has slowed since the capture of Saddam, and the attacks that do occur have less firepower to them.
Some of the political commentary on the US presidential race that I've seen looks pretty inane. When candidates appear in debates and the like, what are the reporters supposed to be doing, reporting what they actually said, or awarding points on style? I don't much care who scored points on who or with which block of voters: I want to know who is wisest and most trustworthy.
A lot of attention has been focused on the finding of a cow with BSE in the US. I'm not too worried about it: there are enough people that are that they are addressing the problem.
Congrats to the the team behind Spirit! After the apparent loss of Beagle 2 and the last couple of lander attempts, it's about time something went right. Mars is an interesting place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there. As much as I admire the enthusiasm of the Mars society and their lobbying for a manned mission to Mars as the next target of the Space program, I think we would be better off learning how to get up and down from low Earth orbit for less than several million dollars a trip. I want to see an automated Lunar farside observatory with regular maintenance crews before sending a crew to Mars. The monumental bureacracy of NASA isn't going to get the job done. They lost the ability back in the 70s when the Apollo program was cut, and they laid off proportionally more engineers than administrators.

My web site is up!! Sapience Knowledge Base I got it loaded Friday night, but found that the server demands lower-case filenames, and most of mine were mixed case. It took me all day Saturday to all those problems fixed. I've been using HotMetal to create my web pages (I don't like Microsoft or its products, so I use them as little as I can get away with, sometimes out of necessity), and it took me some trouble to track down every last one of the filenames that had to be changed in order to get everything working correctly. In the meantime, I went through all the pages and added more content.
I hope to do a little on it almost every day. I've been trying to stay off the web and refrain from working on my site or my various other projects on Sundays, so I finished the round of updates this morning and relaoded the site. That puts me a little behind on researching search engine optimization and submittion, adding features such as graphics, as well as links to put on the site and here, but I should have more of these soon.
This blog should have more of the daily stuff that's of interest to me, but is rather more personal and incidental. More of the serious content and links will go on various pages of the knowledge base.

Partway there!. I have the domain name registered, (www. sapiencekb.com) but don't have the content uploaded yet. I don't see anything really worth commenting on in the news yet. It looks like predictions of Howard Dean's political demise with the capture of Saddam Hussein were premature. I just read "I'm a Soldier, Too", the Jessica Lynch story. It seems like very little of the hype that went on then and soon after had much to do with the facts, which is often the case. I also read a small book, more of a pamphlet, really, that offers a description of Islam. It read like a religious tract, claiming to offer proof that Islam is the one true religion. I find that I agree with the ethics but disagree with the theology of Islam.
In RLV news, there is some discussion of the benefits of an incremental approach to development, which I agree with entirely. Trying to make something large, from scratch, doesn't work.
One area where I have had some interest and want to keep track of is renewable energy, and I might as well start with a site from the US Department of energy.