Sapience

Negligent, that's me; for something that was intended to be daily, it's been a while. For some reason I've had a block about actually doing any work on the SKB. Indecision about what to do next is part of it. Lack of any feedback at all is a bigger one. Same thing about this blog. I'm shy of publicity, especially when I know something doesn't have the quality I would like it to have, but I need to find some way of getting more response.

I got some revision done on physics and mechanics and added a couple of pages Friday night. I haven't been able to do much over the weekend.
Some of the more successful efforts at development of the site have come when I have remembered that the organization needs to be driven by the data. I have a tendency to forget this.
Saturday I started another approach to reviewing encyclopedic data, and basing the site on it. For the most part, this approach hasn't yet caught up to what's on the site, but it is pointing to some areas that will need more attention. Specifically, government and biology are areas that are likely to closer analysis.

I have been making improving the connections of various pages to science, physics, and mechanics. Some of these will be useful, but others are being made at least partly in order to clear the way for more useful, or at least more interesting areas.
For most of the site, which involves human and social sciences and humanities, the areas of personal studies may prove more valuable. Most of these that do make use of the sciences also emphasize astronomy and earth science over physics and chemistry, but the natural sciences will make just as much use of chemistry as physics.
Likewise, although mechanics is a fundamental area, most of the sciences need as much from electromagnetism and thermodynamics as from mechanics.
These areas are not yet demanding classical mechanics much in preference to other areas, although I am itching to develop these subjects a little further.

I've had limited computer access for the past couple of days, so I haven't added much to the site. I've had no response to my first round of inquiries, so I guess the site isn't particularly interesting. I'm working on (yet another) scheme for selecting what connections to make and what areas to develop; hopefully this will yield more progress.

More modifications to the SKB; I decided that the prioritization scheme wasn't working, so I'm back to an older bottom-up approach. Quite a few pages are still using concepts for the ordering and presentation of information that I have modified, and I'm working mostly with pages that are higher in the hierarchy, so that I can use them appropriately as guides to lower level divisions.
No response yet from the first round of physics professors; I hope to try more of them, but it isn't looking good.

I got a few modifications to the SKB in. I have a better account of science history, and several pages within physics have better connections to history. I've written to a few professors of physics asking for feedback on my site and asking other questions. It's a bit early to look for a response yet. I have been looking through the chemistry portion of my site for areas to update, and I'm embarrassed. This is far too preliminary a sketch of how I want things to develop. While I'm waiting for computer access, it's time to review my chemistry texts and make better notes on content. Most of the chemistry pages are far behind in the inversion process I mentioned earlier this week.

It appears that my computer's power supply has died the death, so my ability to work on the web site will be indefinitely slow and uncertain. I have been pondering what to do with the more limited resources I now have, and it appears that this may be actually a blessing in disguise.
The idea behind my site is integration of knowledge, and it appears that hardly anyone will be interested unless I begin to actively go out and make contact with experts on the subject. So far, I have yet to recieve a single e-mail comment on either my web site or this blog. I may have to go solicit readers one at a time, and I hate cold contacts.

Site update!

The "inversion" or reversal of topics had progressed more than I thought, so I decided to go ahead and post it. I've been racing along with connections and giving less attention to content, so at least in the early science sections, I hope to pay more attention to it, including more links and the like. I collected a few good physics links, although it's not at all easy to find the kind of sites I like. I believe my organization of the subject is more rational than some of those I've seen, but it's not traditional.

I had intended this to be nearly daily and it started that way, but events have intervened. Some days I have little to say, some I don't have computer access, and some are occupied with other demands.
A day or so after it got it's launch license, Scaled Composites flew another test flight, one which reached Mach 2 and a third of the way to the X-prize altitude. Way to go! I read that by the rules of the X-Prize, they need to give 30 days notice before their attempt. I'll be watching. In the meantime, there are two other launch applications pending: besides the one for X-corp, there is one for Armadillo aerospace.

My "voting" scheme for development wasn't working as well as I hoped. One problem is that it results in somewhat helter-skelter development without much rhyme, reason, or consistency. So, I've modified it a little and started in a different direction. Another major change is that I'm inverting the site, putting everything in the reverse order, so instead of a top-to-bottom approach, it's going bottom-to-top, so I start with science instead of history. For various reasons, this approach seems to work better. There are still some kinks to work out before I put the new version up.

I worked out the mathematical problems with the solar radiation model I was working on, and the results are finally making sense. I would like to extend this a little, but I'm going to save that for another time.

I thought the insurgency in Iraq was going to start dying down, but I don't see it happening. The pattern looks much like what happened in Yugoslavia when Tito died. Tito, like Saddam Hussein, was a dictator who held the disparate elements of his country together by force and terror. When he died, there was no one person who could control the country: instead, it disintegrated into fights for political power among would-be successors, each of whom wanted absolute power for their own supporters.
Post-Saddam Iraq appears to be in the same kind of mess. No one person can command the support of a majority as well as the military, and the US is trying to hold the country together while some kind of local authority learns how to govern the country without Saddam and his loyal supporters, who will continue to oppose whoever besides themselves is governing the country.
unfortunately, the only expedient seems to be a rather brutal one. Identify and arrest anyone in arms against the government. If they yield up their arms, parole them. If not, execute them. They if they violate parole, execute them. As far as those who advocate that others take up arms against the government, they should be offered a choice, keep silent or be silenced. Whether they should be silenced or executed might depend on how effective their call for arms has been.

I notice that Scaled Composites, the apparent leader in the X-Prize race, has been given a launch license, which hopefully means that more powered test flights should be coming soon. I believe Xcorp, which is not a contender for the X-Prize but which has a similar goal of developing suborbital craft first, also has an application in process. There is a bill in Congress which has passed the House but not the Senate yet, which will provide for a streamlined process for such experimental vehicles; I don't know when action is expected on this. I've said before that these companies are doing what NASA is not: they are building hardware, testing it, and flying it. This approach is more likely to succeed than NASA's approach, "build a big, capable vehicle, never mind the complexity and cost, and fix all the foreseeable problems before you fly because you can't afford a failure".

The State of Illinois has offered its official regrets for the 1844 murder of Joseph and Hyrum Smith and the 1846 expulsion of the Mormons from the state. No reparations, though.
I've speculated on what it would take for a for a government to attempt to rectify injustices that occurred long ago. It wouldn't be a simple or easy process. If I steal something from you, I should legitimately give it back, plus interests. But if my ancestor stole something from your ancestor, how much should I give back? Intervening events would complicate this question considerably. Indians, blacks, and Japanese, to name a few of the more conspicuous examples would be interested.

I did a little work on the mathematics of modeling solar radiation, and part of it is trickier than I expected. It's been a while since I took my calculus, and I'm having problems interpreting my results.

I had a couple of days whe my computer was working, so I managed to get a round of updates up o the web. The site is growing in a rather treeish fashion: it's only noticeable after some time.

Technical difficulties with my computer mean no progress on the web site. I haven't been able to successfully power on and boot up since Tuesday. In the meantime, I have been working on a world-building project. I got stuck on the problem of global climate modeling, specifically associated with the distribution of temperature according to latitude.
It's not hard to do what's called a zero-dimensional heat balance model that roughly accounts for average worldwide temperature. It's a bit harder to extend this.
One extension is to consider the atmosphere as contributing, so I have a vertical dimension, and various processes:
Transmission, reflection, absorption, and reradiation, and how these interact.
Another is a horizontal extension with latitude, and there are daily and seasonal variations. This is another common level of modeling.
Finally, the surface has two dimensions, (latitude and longitude), so I want to subdivide the latitude based model.
Although I can find equations that give the angle of the sun at a particular place as a function of time and position, I would have to integrate these over a year during daylight hours, to get average radiation received.
Mathematically, this seems to involve evaluating a double integral: I have to sum radiation (a constant) times solar angle (varies with time of day, latitude, day of year), between limits that depend on sunrise and sunset. (latitude, day of year). But latitude at any given place is a constant, and this over a full annual cycle. I think that will do it.
This is a numerical process: theoretically I could do it, but practically don't have the time or programming sills (Especially I/O), even if my computer were working. I may try a few sample calculations by hand to see how long it takes.

Also in the meantime, while my computer is sick, I have been trying a handwritten notebook version of things I am working on or want to examine, which may serve as a guide to the prioritization process I mentioned Wednesday.