numbers

Maybe it  just looks like an octopus to Uncle Ken because he is so afraid of something going wrong and having to dig in and well, who knows what, good things seldom happen when Uncle Ken digs into shit.  He is a big ideas guy, not  a detail guy.


Time is indeed a river, unless it is like the sands in an hourglass.  Actually a river is like the sands of an hourglass inasmuch as it is made up of discrete molecules.  The last I heard there was still a controversy as to whether the universe is digital or analogue.  And of course Objective Reality is beyond the feeble reach of time.  Time is just another dimension and if properly stated I should speak of the tree in my backyard at 6:00 AM 12/29/16.  I think though, if I just speak of a tree in my backyard and you don't know what kind of tree it is, and we are pretty much speaking in the present time I can just say I have a tree in my backyard.

The Vienna Circle of the 20s, including Wittgenstein and that maverick Godel were big proponents of logical positivism which I think is the same thing as, or close to anyway, Objective Reality.  They had a rule at one time that they could only speak to each other in logical sentences concerning objective objects but they had to give that up when they couldn't talk to each other.


It always seemed to me, and to some others I believe, that we should use a base 12 for our numbers, that way we wouldn't run into any fractions until we got to seven which is two later than with a base of 10.  Fractions are a big problem.  From my substitute days it seems like this was the point where a lot of the students dropped their math enthusiasm.  Up to this point everything had been pretty logical, but that thing where when you divide fractions you reverse the one on the right side and multiply just seems so arbitrary.  But why Mr Schadt,  Because I said so, that's why.

And back in the day they didn't  have that simple notation like 3/4, which even then is not that different from 3-4 (imagine little dots above and beneath the dash, a little shocking that my keyboard doesn't have that key.).  It's kind of an arrested development.  Notation is big in math.  If the Arabs hadn't stolen the zero form the Indians we would be up to our asses in X's, V's, L's C's and whatever.  How high did the Roman numerals go?  Google says M, though it appears that you can stack bars on top of it to increase it ten times, but come on.


I got lost looking back to the line about Mr Bond having his mind fragmented/  I'm sure I had a good reason.  It was all tilted towards getting to title it a bagatelle of the brain. I guess Old Dog reads a ,more high toned year in review than I do.  I never see that much interesting in it and it seems skewed towards sports and celebrity crapola, mere, dare I say it, bagatelles.