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Facets of Greatness: Understanding the Political System

The Articles of Confederation may have been a more idealistic government, but let's be serious here: do you really think they intended that to last? Not really. It was good enough. Good enough to give our founders about a decade to figure out what would be great enough to last centuries. That's what I mean. Yeh, Thomas Jefferson might have wanted the Articles to last. It didn't have the power or mechanism to tax states. That's like asking the Red Cross to run your government. But this is what I mean: they knew it was going to play out like that. And what would you do?

Facets of Greatness: Congressional Power Structures

Your understanding of the system is your most valuable asset. You can't forget that. Your understanding of how things really work. And politicians know that. People in general know that. Some people will tend to obfuscate a system, so it appears to work in one way, but there are other, less visible factors at work. How you model the system and perceive the relationships between people is incredibly valuable. This is in constant flux. It's not going to be the same from year to year. The only constant is change. Just because you figured out how it worked in 2010 doesn't mean it's going to be like that in 2020. The ability to anticipate that change is powerful as well.

Consciousness as a Continuum: Life, the Cosmos and You

As senses evolve, they provide us with a bigger window to that world. As our brains evolved, they provide us with a better processing that expands that same window with aggregate information at various levels, expanding to the kind of consciousness that human beings experience. The kind that forces us to question why? Why am i here? What is my purpose? What is my directive?

American Eros: Or How to Fell A Souley

I had a sudden inspiration to write down the perfect love scene. It came to me on Wednesday. I was wondering why I've never had that love at first sight experience. And then I thought, why should sight be involved? Could someone fall in love without ever seeing someone? What would that be like? My head started spinning...

I'm Not Religious, I'm Spiritual: A Lighthouse in a Storm

So, religion is a perfect tool for helping to counter this cultural deconstruction and generational stratification, but it can only be helpful if large enough sets of people in our culture share belief systems. In particular, they must share those beliefs which form the basis of the rest of their beliefs. The notion of a basis was discussed in the first section of this series. Where the bases formed primarily from scientific knowledge are always shifting, those formed by and tied to religion are much more constant. In this way, elements of religion act as metacultural fixpoints in the psyche of believers.

If I Had the Chops to Write My Daedalian Magnum Corpus

Dico ergo quia non loquimur de talibus naturaliter possibilibus sed miraculose possibilibus quod in uno parvo spacio et loco ut in loco grani milii vel sub eius magnitudine Deus posset formare valde magnum corpus, scilicet maius quam sit mundus et verum est quod illud corpus non esset in illo parvo corpore vel loco circumscriptive et commensurabiliter.

Divergents and Directional Antennae: Measurement and Inference

This categorical coherence looks for higher level patterns. It could identify the presence of diseases previously unknown, not because it's matching against a list of diseases and their progressions, but because it's identified unknown patterns of neurodegeneration in a patient. In addition to unknown disease progression, this could also identify the combination of drug-induced neurological damage or damage induced by the combination of diseases.

Education Goals 2016

Here's a list of things that are incredibly interesting and I couldn't live without learning. I'm hoping to learn plasma physics to get to the point where I can hang with people doing real research and maybe apply my creativity.

Divergents and Directional Antennae

I started thinking about directional antennae and reason about what kind of math would allow me to predict the shape of the energy distribution, first given idealized omnidirectional or directional antennae. And later, given the specific structure of a more realistic antenna, I hoped to identify some relationships that would allow computation of energy propagation and distribution.

I'm Not Religious, I'm Spiritual: Of God and Atheisms

Which part of the beauty of this world did you miss? Did you take a look at that sapphiric jewel floating in the massive expanse of ether? Did you stop to think that the only reason we can begin to fathom the infinite, magnificent expanse of our universe is because the universe began to reflect intangible metaphysical artifacts and imbued star dust with the potential to become self-aware. Over the course of billions of years, the universe evoked forms through which it could wonder in awe of it's own beauty.