Rube Goldberg Machines, Feedback, Sound, Compression, Noise, and Economic/Political Systems
I like to think of most feedback systems as sets of subsystems that are connected in such a way that there exists at least one causal loop. What I mean by "connected" is the existence of communication between the things that are connected that causes change (or lack thereof) that is a part of the relevant or behavior of interest of the whole system. The concept of a Rube Goldberg machine provides a good mental picture of what causal paths are. Here's one: a shoe kicks a ball to knock over a bowling pin that bursts a balloon full of baking soda that drops in the vinegar to make the volcano explode. The path could be represented like this: shoe -> ball -> bowling pin -> balloon -> volcano, where each item connected to an arrow(s) is what I referred to as a subsystem. It's sometimes difficult to figure out what the subsystems should be, and that's often of primary or considerable interest when working with all sorts of systems. For example, the question, "What is matter composed of?" deals with exactly this issue. There are systems called molecules that are composed of subsystems that are atoms. Atomic systems are also composed of particle subsystems that according to our current understanding, goes several layers deeper in order to create our most elegant, complete description of matter. Sometimes a system is too complicated to sufficiently deal with as a whole to the extent which we desire yet seemingly inseparable or cannot be conceptually decomposed into subsystems easily. It may or may not be possible to do so. Wolfram coined the fitting term for some of these kinds of systems that cannot be broken up or abstracted in a way such that an additional, conceptually simpler system can be imagined and/or constructed that predicts the evolution of the system (the most common predictor system is currently, unquestionably the finite state machine or the digital computer) the output of the system (possibly the relevant "observables" in the system), or the relationship between some input and output: "computationally irreducible". Another way to describe a computationally irreducible system is a system whose behavior can only be found by "running" the system, or "just letting it evolve". Many chaotic systems are often considered to be close to computationally irreducible (or at least more so than non-chaotic systems) because future states are difficult or impossible to predict into the future with accuracy.

Just these few concepts allow us to form some analogies between a pleasingly wide range of different topics, to create an abstraction that describes similarities, commonalities, congruencies, or equivalencies between systems, which is one of the central theme of systems theory. Oops, gotta go class....will finish later.

Some thoughts on silence
I can remember several recurring instances where I acknowledged being in complete silence. One of them was in my grandma's bathroom after getting off the bus from school in the afternoon. I always had to use the restroom so bad at that exact same time, which I also found interesting. The silence was interesting because it was loud. If it was loud, how did I know that I was "in silence"? Well, I heard the same "noise" everyday when I was in the "silence" and I was pretty sure there was nothing else around that would make any of the noise I heard. There weren't any machines on in the house or outside. I knew this because I had explored the house and the neighborhood thoroughly. When you move around with respect to noise sources, that's how you can tell where they are and that they are in fact the source of some particular noise...other than stereoscopic effects. Now I wonder if I could somehow measure the frequency spectrum of what I hear when I'm in complete silence. How can you do that and test that what you did makes sense? I could create complete silence by using a microphone more sensitive than my ears connected to some electronics or a computer to tell me if there was a signal coming out. Then I'd have to trust the engineers who wrote the spec of the microphone...for some reason. Or maybe not. It's hard to remember what you were talking about or trying to do sometimes. Especially when you didn't have any goal in mind anyway. Right now I'm in the Blacklight Lounge on the fourth floor of East Campus, on the west parallel. It was kind of quiet for a little while. I could hear a very faint hum of the Millipede arcade machine and the soft buzz of the ballasts in the black lights. Because the sound of them is so unchanging and persistent, my brain seems to drop them out unless I pay attention to their sounds, in which case they seem to be amplified.

I started messing around with electronic music several years ago when I learned that MATLAB had this function called sound that pushes a vector out of your computer speaker at whatever sample rate you pick. I had been taking a class on computational neuroscience that I had to program simulations of neurons in MATLAB for the problem sets, so I had some practice with some good maths for creating some neat waveforms. When you can connect programming directly to sound or graphics, it just makes everything fun, so I haven't really stopped doing it. Now I'm taking Electronic Music Composition with Peter Whincop, which was recommended to me by lots of my friends. Our first assignment was to record around 40 short sounds and to arrange them using only techniques that would have been possible in the days of cutting and splicing tape, but we used computers. I did my piece with a sound programming language called Csound. Here's an MP3 of it and a zip of the source code:
okie-movingonafteraslipperyafternoon.mp3
okie-movingonafteraslipperyafternoon.zip

The naturalistic fallacy occurs when something natural is claimed to be inherently good and that the unnatural is inherently bad.

A slice of a conversation during a chance meeting in a secret underground Athena cluster:

Okie: What if other intelligent life in the universe had a reason to make the rest of the universe look like it was expanding to us? For example, maybe it or they knew that we'd develop the technology to make the Sun blow up into a supernova and that we would likely decide to do it for one reason or another and then they could then swipe up all the goodies that come out like massive elements, organic compounds, etc.? We can easily imagine how this could be done. Just imagine if you take a bunch of little solar panels and put them around a light bulb so that they're a sphere and put some red LEDs on the back of them.

Scarby: Why wouldn't they just blow it up themselves?

Okie: I don't know, for some other reason we don't know?

Scarby: Maybe because they probably have to get approval from Congress before they can go and blow up another star.

On feminism and celebration

I am a feminist, but to be more specific, I will act as if I am about to give my opinions about some ideas that may characterize different schools of thought.

I look at feminism from the point of view of myself in the current time and project myself to different times. So, for example, I look at the principles and ideas of first-wave feminism by projecting myself to other periods in time, and then I consider the relevance of those ideas in the world today. Through these projections, I ask myself several questions: What is the current state of things? What is the ideal state of things? What change is possible? What's the best way to influence change?

Of course I believe that laws should apply equally to both sexes (even abortion laws, though men cannot currently birth children). That's a given. And I won't address those aspects of feminist movements. Outside of legal equality, the second-wave feminist movement that began around the early 1960s addressed sexuality and non-legal inequalities. These issues are rooted in the traditions of societies, and some argue that even capitalism plays a destructive role here. Inequalities in the workforce and sexuality issues spurred scientific debate regarding gender differences, and reactions to these debates led to third-wave feminism and post-feminism.

Third-wave feminism challenges the definition of femininity, supports a more continuous notion of gender, and celebrates freedom in sexuality. Some say that third-wave feminism is the result of generations that have grown up with feminism. This is true, but it's often followed by a negative critique of third-wave feminism. My issue with the statement is that third-wave feminism is complex and is a result of many more factors than just "growing up with feminism".

About the same time the third-wave feminist movement and other movements such as the LGBT movement were moving to celebration of sexuality, other ideas also "decided" that it was time to celebrate. The theme is celebration. The free use of terms that used to be considered offensive is celebrated. Anything that was not previously celebrated is celebrated: the terms cunt, whore, bitch, etc., prostitution, stereotypes of all types. Intellectuals, celebrate. Anti-intellectuals, celebrate. Atheists, celebrate; the evangelical Christians were already celebrating. To get attention, you celebrate. Everyone likes a party, and the biggest party wins. Celebrate because you have all the sex, all the drugs, and you have the best life. Celebrate because you've had it tough. You have the biggest tits, the biggest dick, and have all the fun. You have the cutest tits, the cutest dick, and you look really good in your clothes. Celebrate because you're super fat, celebrate because you can make fun of people really well. You work hard. You are the most passionate; you understand people. Celebrate the solstice. What you make, everyone adores.

Has humility been trumped? Has it always been this way, or does it cycle? How long must we wait for no gender or infinite varieties of gender, one mind or infinite minds?

This is a video clip put through a filter I wrote in MATLAB. It finds edges that are moving and creates a transparent haze there that cycles through the colors of the rainbow and more.
http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/42394/okierainbow.avi

The constructal theory is the mental viewing that the generation of design (configuration, pattern, geometry) in nature is a physics phenomenon that unites all animate and inanimate systems, and that this phenomenon is covered by the Constructal Law stated by Adrian Bejan in 1996: "For a finite-size (flow) system to persist in time (to live), its configuration must evolve such that it provides easier access to the imposed currents that flow through it."

Life can be described as those systems that evolve to make energy flow through them most efficiently.

SPECTRAL UNIVERSES! MATH POEM THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
This is a beautiful thought experiment expounded by Harold Cooper about the possible evolution of continuously morphing, continuous universes. He proves that if the universe is continuous and changes continuously, then no matter what the physical laws are, it will not eventually reach every possible state, among other things.

John Conway lectures on the free will theorem that says if we have some free will, then according some assumptions, so do particles like electrons.
http://www.princeton.edu/WebMedia/flash/lectures/2009_03_04_conway_free_will.shtml

"Some readers may object to our use of the term “free will” to describe the indeterminism of particle responses. Our provocative ascription of free will to elementary particles is deliberate, since our theorem asserts that if experimenters have a certain freedom, then particles have exactly the same kind of freedom. Indeed, it is natural to suppose that this latter freedom is the ultimate explanation of our own."