Marius Myburg's Weblog

I am listening to the song “The Post War Dream” by Pink Floyd.  In it he is asking “Tell me true, tell me why, was Jesus crucified?  Was it for this that daddy died?  Was it you, was it me?  Did I watch too much TV?  Is that a hint of accusation in your eyes?”  “What have we done, Maggie what have we done?”

This Pink Floyd guy was a central influence on my life when I was a young boy.  He is a hell of an artist.  He made me really think about some things.

And now, as I listen to his song and I reminisce, I still wonder; what the bloody hell have we done?  This world of ours – Earth – is pretty shit sometimes.  Excuse my language but my intention is to convey feeling – and it is not just unpleasant or a little bad sometimes – it is absolute shit sometimes.  People and other animals die from hunger, which is bad – but they die from lack of love, or physical and emotional abuse. There is very little respect, very little ambition, and very much selfishness and jealousy and bad stuff.  What HAVE we done?

As a species we have made one major screw-up of things, don’t you think?

Complaining will not solve these problems – so what can we do?  The answer, I think, is wait.  I do think the global situation, both physical and species-wide mentally, is improving.  Damn I hope so.

Last night I went to a ‘White Crane style’ kung-fu class to check it out.  It is kung-fu after all – the ultimate martial art?

My honest opinion is that the class was a little disorganised, but more importantly, they had no respect for the style, no feel for the higher goals and philosophy – not even respect for the sensei (I think in kung-fu it is ‘Shifu’), and little respect for physical effort.

In my Goju-Ryu dojo, when we had to do push-ups (for instance), we had to do push-ups, no matter how tired we were.  We would never give in to our tiredness – because then we would have to start all over again. This may seem very strict but it did make us tough as hell.

In the kung-fu class last night, students were lying on the ground, arms outstretched, from tiredness.  The sensei did say ‘Are your legs tired?  Ignore them!” – which I have respect for.  I can not fault the sensei.  But his class – not good.  And their lack of respect for the style was most amazing.  Martial arts is a philosophy.  That is why practitioners can do amazing things – because their hearts are in it.  In Goju, we always bowed properly when entering or exiting the dojo – a sign of respect to the school and an acknowledgement that you are here to learn.  In the kung-fu class, they have a hand gesture that they do when entering and leaving the dojo – a hand gesture that almost all students executed extremely half-heartedly that actually fills me with unhappiness.  Why do it, if you are not doing it properly?  Just for show?  They are not making a good show of it either!

Then, the style.  In white crane style they have very unnatural hand postures while blocking.  A degree of unnaturalness is expected in martial arts – you are teaching your body a new way of movement and posture after all – but my honest opinion is that, at least that block they practiced last night, will not block anything.  Moreover, it will cause the body to be unbalanced.  End result – you lose the fight and die.

Another thing is that the sensei told the students to block with the outside of the arm, because the skin is toucher than that of the inside.  This is valid.  But in Goju, we were taught the same – but also taught that, in the tradition of Mui-thai, we also have to toughen our weak parts so that we do not have that disability.  True, don’t block with soft parts of your body.  Kung-fu solution: don’t block with insides of arm.  Goju solution: condition the insides of your arms to be as tough as the outsides.

It’s not all bad, and I don’t want to be negative about what I saw last night.  It is just – I miss Goju!  And from what I saw last night, kung-fu appears to be more for show, whereas Goju-Ryu is concerned solely with self-defence and truly building character and – winning in a fight.  No fancy hand movements – just effective, quick, and deadly hand movements.  For aesthetics I will do ballet or kung-fu.  For martial arts I will do Goju.

To my friends who took me to their dojo – I am not saying kung-fu is bad.  It is very good, especially for fitness.  But as a style, I feel Goju-Ryu is much better.

A while ago I listed all of the books I own, but I missed one very important book by Susan Haack.

“Defending Science – Within Reason” by Susan Haack.

To learn a bit about science, read Susan Haack’s book.  Only then come to me with your ignorant ideas about science and your even more ignorant notions of Adam and Eve, please.  Do some research first before giving your opinion.

I am not mean, but really I have had enough of misinformed people.  It’s not your fault – and I do not hold it against you.  What I would hold against you, or anyone, is if you are ignorant by choice.  If you will not even try to pick up this book (or any one of the millions of books out there), but still speak as if you know what you are talking about.

Stop wasting your life believing in fairy tales!  Grow up!  Aaaargh!

I must take a deep breath and think about pleasant things.  Like knowledge.  And books.  And hot chicks.  And hot coffee.  And vegerarian hot dogs.  And various fruits and vegetables.  And chocolates.

No… no no no no no.  It is abundantly clear to me: I must go home now.

Talk to you again when I am more… balanced.

http://www.4shared.com/file/67637105/2fb48ab0/SourceCodeEditor20Oct2008.html

For source control I use TortoiseSVN (http://tortoisesvn.net/).  In my opinion it does the job well.

What source control do you use?

There is a spider walking over my screen, checking me out as I type this.  Hehe.

My artificial general intelligence project, Farve, is fast becoming what I envisioned it to be 9 years ago.  It is beautiful, in an intellectual sense.  My revolutionary neural network architecture WORKS.  My extendable programming language with my Extensive Connectivity module loaded WORKS.  I can easily create neural systems with the ease of manipulating native EXCON objects (neuron, synapse, link etc), but within my programming language.  And it all WORKS beautifully.

This is what I did last night:

for (var i=0; i<100; i++)
{
   var nrn = create_neuron_boolean(“nrn” + i);
   nrn.IsSignalling = true;
}

No bugs, just 100 boolean-signal extensive connectivity neurons, that I can access directly from the Farve code editor, created in 1 second.

What is 10/3? If you enter that on your calculator, you will get the result 3.3… What does this mean? The ellipses means that the value after the decimal point and before the ellipses continue indefinately. But what does that mean? What is the value then? If you write 3.3 and add 100 more 3s, you would not have the answer. In fact, you can add any number of 3s – you will still not have the value because, as soon as you stop adding 3s and ask ‘Is this the value?’ you would have broken the ruleimplied by the ellipses – that of infinite repetition.

So in a very real sense, when you get an answer to a mathematical equation and the answer has an infinite decimal, then you have no answer at all – you simply have a ‘look, it is very close to 3.3…, but I can not give you an exact value’.

What I want people to realise is that the very best answer to the question “what is 10 / 3?”, is “10 / 3″. If this sounds absurd – consider that “10/3″ is simply a representation of a value. And it turns out, in fact, that 3.333… is also a representation – but a representation of an undeterminate value that only ever approaches the true value of 10/3.

Because we have 10 fingers, we are used to a base-10 mathematical system, and this system, unfortunately, pervades all of mathematics. The value “10″ is everywhere. The value 10 is implicitly in the value 0.5, for example. Why is 0.5 equal to “one half”?  What does 5 have to do with halving? Because the first value after the decimal point stands for, literally, “divide this value by 10″. So 0.5 is exactly equivalent to (0*10) + (5/10). 10 is everywhere. This is a strength – and a weakness.

The weakness is this: obviously, not all values are divisable, without a remainder, into 10.

This means that our mathematical system is unable to accurately represent, in decimal form, many – actually an infinitely many – values. One of these values is the extremely simple concept “three parts out of ten”. It is a simple enough concept. If you have ten pebbles, and take three, then the ratio between the three compared to all ten is how many pebbles you hold in your hand compared to how many pebbles there are in total. Simply, it means, 3 out of 10!  Duh!

And yet, in mathematics we have a drive to want to force this ratio – 10/3 – in terms of the decimal system and thus in terms of (y*1) + (x/10). I.e. – we think that the “real answer” is not “10/3″, but that it is (y=3) and (x=3) instead. We do this implicitly by writing 3.3… But herein lies the illogicalness (new word?) of it all – what we are taught to perceive as the more accurate / more acceptable answer, is in fact absurd, because it results in infinite regression, not only in the infinite repetition after the decimal point – but in the expanded, equivalent, equation form! And that is serious. An infinite equation does NOT equate any two determinite values, and is therefore not really an equation at all.

Note again that, by writing “3.33…”, and considering the meaning of the decimal point, this is simply shorthand for:

(3*1) + (3/10)

We write this as the answer to (10 / 3 = ?).

(3/10) and (10/3) are related. For any values x and y, (x/y) and (y/x) relate so that (x/y) * (y/x) = 1. This just means that as 10 divided by 3 can not be represented as a base-10 value, neither can 3 divided by 10 be represented as a base-10 value – and in fact, the ‘error’ produces when attempting to do so for 3/10 is a ‘power of -10′ of the error produced when attempting the same for 10/3.

Hence the equation itself is an infinite regression.

(10/3) = (3*1) + (3/10)

(3/10) = (0*1) + (3/10)

Do you see the infinite equational (new word?) regression?

That is my problem with the whole notion. The very notion is invalid, becasue if you were to try to solve this equation, you would never be able to arrive at a result – you CAN NOT arrive at a result because in order to get the result you have to get the result, but to do that you must get the result… the ’solution’ to the problem references the problem itself.

And this is the crux of the isue. It is like writing the problem:

x = x + 1, solve for x.

x can not be solved, because it exists on both sides in a such a way that it cannot be canceled out on only one side. The only concrete ‘fact’ we can show from this equation, is, brace yourself for a universal truth:

1 = 1

And x is nowhere in sight. For good reason – the laws of logic, equivalently the laws of mathematics, can simply not work with a flawed premise – a problem where the answer depends on the answer. Mathematics looks at absurd statements like that and says “BLEH.“

What is my point, you may ask? So what, you ask? I am reminded of friends and colleagues who ask of my artificial intelligence “But what does it do?” My point, dear reader, is this: pi is a logical fallacy.

DIDYOUKNOWTHATWORDSEPERATIONISAMIDDLEAGEINVENTION?

ARCHIMEDESONEOFTHEGREATESTSCIENTISTSANDTHINKERSOFALLTIME

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