Very busy

I have six posts in the works, but nothing is getting written until I finish this project. Just a few more days now.

On My Lonely Bookshelf

Here’s a list of books that are waiting for me to finish my Master’s. Some of these I’ve been in the middle of for months or years already.

Brothers Karamazov
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Don Quixote
A Feast For Crows
Tao Te Ching
Predictably Irrational
Being And Nothingness
Notes From The Underground
Basic Writings of Nietzsche
Das Kapital
The Laws of Simplicity
Competing on Analysis
Blue Latitudes
John Adams
The Chicago School
The Order of Things
Proust Was a Neuroscientist
The Art of War
An Empire of Wealth
Collapse
Smart and Gets Things Done
What Do You Care What Other People Think
Faust
The Dispossessed
Good Germs Bad Germs

"Whoa" Or: Pseudo-philosophic question of the day

Reading about both the largest known structures in the universe and the smallest known structures in the universe (galactic filaments and quantum foam and/or strings [i’m not sure which works best] respectively) led me to an idea:

“What if the macro structures we observe are really micro structures?”

-Think, Men in Black with the galaxy marbles.

“What if galactic filaments are the quantum foam (or strings)?”

All distances are in a 1-1 relationship, such as scale models. Our understanding of physical laws breaks down at both scales. If (big if) you assume that both scales are infinite, then like the counting numbers and the rational numbers, both scales are of the same cardinality… maybe… I didn’t think this through so much as thought “this could be neat”. 

And that’s my pseudo-philosophy for the day.

On the need to release ideas and a hatred of 10

Sometimes I just need to get words to text, and I’ve never made use of the many outlets for that sort of desire before. Often, most of my ideas and thoughts have either gone unsaid, or been mentioned only to my long-suffering girlfriend. She is far less excited about certain common thoughts that keep running about in my head. As an example, the easiest way to irritate her now is to mention a Base-12 number system. I find Base-10 to be a wholly unfortunate numerical system. The whole common system of numbers we use is based off of counting our fingers.

My gripe with Base-10 lies mostly in how utterly unremarkable a number 10 is (as an aside, yes I do know I choose words and phrasings poorly). It has very similar properties to 14. Both numbers are divisible by only two primes, one of them being 2. Both are adjacent, or at least near other, far more interesting numbers. Ten is adjacent to both a prime, and a power of a prime. Fourteen is adjacent to another prime, and close to the first power of a power of a prime (power tower). I find it a damn shame that we don’t have six fingers to a hand. It would be way more aesthetically pleasing, as powers of 12 are evenly divisible by far more numbers than powers of 10 are. For example, the last digits of consecutive square numbers follow a 0,1,4,9,4,1 pattern in base 12. Compare that to the uglier version from base 10: 0,1,4,9,6,5,6,9,4,1.

On a side note, trying to do arithmetic in a different base system is a bitch. Try multiplying 17(in base 12) by 13(in base 12) in base 12 in your head and give the answer in base 12