Conviction

How sad it is when the biggest conviction someone has is the conviction to avoid effort.  (Don't tell my intimidating but well-meaning friend that though.  She'll accuse me of possessing such a conviction.)

Do Republicans Ignore Obligations the Rich Possess?

Biblical doctrine does not state that possessing wealth is a sin, but it does state that possession of such wealth comes with more duties.  Those that have means are Biblically obligated to assist those that don't.  Now if you remove Biblical doctrine altogether and focus on the secular alone, then no such obligation exists, unless it's a legal requirement in the form of indirect taxation and distribution.

I can definitely understand people voting against the Republican party for not doing enough in their eyes to pressure the wealthy into alleviating the stresses of the working and handicapped poor.  The poor that are in their condition as a result of their own vices like laziness and drunkenness I do not believe are entitled to be pulled up in an attempt to close the wealth gap, unless they can change their ways.  Trying to close the wealth gap with them is fruitless because they will waste whatever they get, and it's just as bad as sending a reimbursement check to the rich that engage in the same type of wasteful behaviors.  Just because someone is poor doesn't automatically make them virtuous.  Some poor people are just as greedy as the rich and would act exactly in the same way if they had the opportunity.

So how much do Republican politicians ignore the plight of the deserving poor by their methods of cutting taxes for the rich and cutting back on government social programs they deem to be wasteful?  I have no idea.  I do believe a well-behaved full time worker who is homeless long term is a travesty, and things like that should definitely be addressed and corrected in some way.  Is that an obligation of the rich?  I would say possibly so.  The poor sure as heck can't fix a problem like that.  When stuff like that is going on, the rich should probably voluntarily open their pocketbooks a bit more either in the form of wages, charity, or smaller markups on what they sell, so poor people don't vote for higher taxes on the rich to fund more social programs.  Even if done more out of compulsion more than compassion, it seems like the wise thing to do.  I really don't care how wide the gap between the rich and poor is, so long as the working and handicapped poor can live a life in clean surroundings with decent food and medical security.

Rigid vs Flexible - In Physical Structures and Civilizations

A building can't be too rigid or too flexible in order to stand for a long period of time.  If it's too rigid without any give whatsoever, a traumatic event like an earthquake will take it down.  But even though it needs some flexibility, it needs MUCH more solidarity or it won't be able to stand at all.

I think the same thing applies to civilizations.  They need a little give to be able to adapt to traumatic events, but they need far more of a rigid structure than a flexible one to stand for long periods of time.  Rigid with some flexibility rather than flexible with some rigidity.  

A Small Tribute to Yitang Zhang

Got to have respect for a guy who makes a huge breakthrough in prime gaps even though at one point he had to leave academia to work in a Subway sandwich shop.  Talk about being overqualified.  I guess you never know who is behind that counter when you order.

Mr. Zhang, let this post be a small acknowledgement of your amazing accomplishments.  I wish you well going forward in your career and life.

A Conundrum

 Moral absolutism is unverifiable, moral relativism is inconsistent, and moral nihilism is worthless.

Perpendicular Motion - The Key to Maxwell's Equations?

I remember I had somewhat of a difficult time trying to get the last two formulas in Maxwell's equations to make sense to me.  Then one day I stumbled upon some physics textbook I found in the UHCL library that made something in my brain click.  I reviewed the book on Amazon, but unfortunately I can't remember the name of the book at the moment. 

I believe the book first mentioned how magnetic poles on a pair of magnets either attract or repel each other.  But both do so more or less linearly.  If you put an electric charge and a magnetic charge close to each other, the outcome is quite different.  Instead of attracting or repelling each other linearly, the motion of one is almost perpendicular as the other approaches.  

This clarified the whole circular motion in Maxwell's equations for me.  Immediately the curl operation made sense, because before I was exposed to this idea it just seemed like an arbitrary operation in vector calculus.  

We Risk Ridiculous Fascist Accusations Now to PREVENT Actual Fascism in the Future

Man, it seems sometimes no matter how far left things move on the pendulum of permissiveness, if you try to even move slightly back to the center, you get accused of being a fascist.  "You ask people to voluntarily moderate their promiscuity to curb the prevalence of unplanned children in broken homes?  That's fascist!  You want employees to wear uniforms instead of pajamas at work?  That's fascist!  You failed a student who turned in two assignments and refused to do any further work?  That's fascist!"  Well, maybe that last one isn't CALLED fascist too much, but such slacking sure is allowed to happen and serious resistance is encountered when appropriate consequences are attempted.

But if you continually allow more and more permissiveness and do NOT voluntarily move more towards the center in a timely manner, actual fascism WILL be required to get full-blown anarchy back in order.  That kind of fascism is really not good.  So right now it's probably better to try to move a bit more towards the behavioral center willingly rather than involuntarily be forced back later when nature follows through on its delayed effects and forces order on its balance sheet to be restored.  I dread to see what will happen in public education, since that situation is already too chaotic and far gone to restore order without some major correction.

I Wouldn't Mind the Rich Getting Richer, IF it Cleans Up the Culture

I really don't blame people for voting for either party, as I've stated before.  Problem is neither party has a culture cleaning agenda.  Perhaps they're in cahoots.  Wouldn't surprise me.  They both agree beforehand that one party supports this unreasonable stance, and another party supports that unreasonable stance, just to keep things divided so that no other contenders show up.  Who knows.  What's sad though is both seem totally okay with horrendous language dominating every media form there is.  It also seems clear that one of them contains a small but quite vocal subset that is clearly against concepts like monogamy and other similar wholesome ideals, just because they're traditional.  

Bearing this in mind, I'd probably be willing to take a substantial financial hit and give a chunk of my money to people richer than me if it defeats certain agendas once and for all.  Agendas that promote ideas labeling any type of challenge or inconvenience as automatically oppressive, that consider self esteem more important than self control and self respect, that consider whims equivalent to duties, that attempt to discredit merit as a requirement for authority, that purposefully hide painful but necessary truths from young men rather than risk their psychological discomfort, etc.  These ideas have poisoned the minds of an untold number of kids on the internet, whose K through 12 educational abilities have been thoroughly postponed and perhaps permanently damaged as a result of their lack of disciplined pursuit to worthwhile living.  

Whether this sad outcome is worse than rich people manipulating the laws and marketplace to fatten their own pockets even further, I am not sure.  It gets even more complicated when this awful behavior of the wealthy leads to long hours for employees without even the comfort of being able to pay their AC bill.  But when I watch Judge Judy and see grown men spending their money on GoPros instead of rent, I get a little less sympathetic.  

The Only Accounting Journal Entry I Need To Remember

I don't have a very good memory, so for most things I like to remember as little as possible and derive everything else from that small bit.  That's what I do with journal entries in accounting.  I actually only remember one journal entry most of the time, and that is when an expense is recorded.  As long as I remember to debit the expense and credit cash, I'm good.  Then I can derive most other journal entry procedures from there pretty much.  

For instance, from there I can remember to record a sale by debiting cash and crediting revenue.  And I can remember to record a receivable by debiting AR and crediting revenue.  And to debit the receiving bank account and credit AR when the customer pays.  And to record a payable by debiting the expense and crediting AP.  And with an asset purchase, I debit the asset and credit cash or credit a payable.  And so on, and so on.

Seems way easier doing things this way than to memorize each particular type of entry individually.  Even if it may take a bit longer to get to the kind of entry I'm looking for at the moment.

Why I Don't Use Profanity

I very rarely use profanity.  Mostly because it's one of the easier commandments to obey.  LOTS easier than turning the other cheek.  If I can't obey the harder commands, at least I can obey the easier ones.

The Insane Math Behind Near-Integers

I think one time I got curious about that crazy looking infinite series that Ramanujan sent Hardy out of the blue to initiate their collaboration, and other than it being so complicated in appearance, I wondered what as so special about it.  So I began using AI to investigate because I'm lazy and also because I didn't feel like driving up to the UHCL library and paying the parking fees.  I found out the series converges very quickly, and this is the driving idea behind near integers.  If a series converges to an integer quickly, the first term should be pretty close to an integer.

There are probably a few ways to get fast convergence to an integer, but what this kind of math uses is something called the j-invariant.  Every complex plane lattice has a j-invariant number, and this invariant is unique to the lattice shape.  So if you scale or rotate the lattice it doesn't change the j-invariant.  This j-invariant number can be represented as an infinite series, which I am not sure at this moment how it's computed or derived.  I believe the work of Jacobi was used to relate all of the values of the lattice into a unit disk somehow, and that's how the series appears and converges quickly.  And there are special instances where this j-invariant is guaranteed to converge to an integer.  

Now the j-invariant involves a tau value determined by the lattice's periodic values, and that tau value determines the lattice shape.  And when you can get this lattice to map to itself, it's a very special scenario.  It's called complex multiplication.  And I get really fuzzy here because a lot of stuff seems to happen at once and I have no idea what order to describe it in.  As if I weren't already fuzzy on the subject to begin with.  I could be getting a lot of stuff wrong.  But, as I understand it, now we're dealing with lattices in the complex plane, and unlike real numbers complex numbers may or may NOT have unique factorization.  But a clever way was invented so there could be a kind of unique factorization with these things, and that's why something called ideals were invented.  Ideals always factor uniquely, even with complex numbers.  

But from what the imperfect but seemingly well-meaning AI interfaces tell me, each lattice IS an ideal.  And the lattice represented by a tau value for a j-invariant is going to factor since it's an ideal.  The values of the lattice factor into multiple factorizations, and each of those factorizations can form its own lattice.  

Now here's where the complex multiplication self-mappings get really interesting and get to the heart of the whole set-up of tying unique factorizations to exact integer values, which makes the whole near-integer stuff work.  When an ideal maps to itself, it means the mapping operator can at most permute the factors among themselves.  And this puts it into Galois permutation territory.  With this Galois permutation stuff, the sums and products of the factors are going to be whole numbers.  Not sure why this is, like I should be, but I believe that's the case.  So if you only have only one factor as in unique factorization, the sum and product of all factors is going to be whole, which means your j-invariant is going to be a whole number.

So that's what relates unique factorization to exact integers, and what helps us get an integer j-invariant with a near-integer first term in the fast-converging series.  

I was hoping to do a better rough sketch of an explanation, because I'm not exactly super happy with this one, but I think it's probably the best I can do for now.  Hopefully I can do some edits here and there later, and get a better idea of what ideals are.

Moral Nihilism is a Garbage Philosophy

In the past I have attacked moral relativism as contradictory, but I could not accuse moral nihilism of that.  Still can't.  But that doesn't mean I can't call moral nihilism a garbage philosophy, even if it's logically consistent.  I also feel comfortable claiming it's a philosophy from the devil himself.  If these sound like ad hominem attacks, that's because they actually are ad hominem attacks.  But moral nihilism is so weak, it can't even argue that ad hominem attacks possess any less moral worth than actual solid arguments.  That's pathetic.

A fulfilling life requires two things.  It requires a meaningful path to pursue, and it requires the courage to actually take that meaningful path.  Moral nihilism removes both of these things, calling them not worth the effort, and equating them to stagnation.  It removes the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness from the declaration of independence and equates them to death, enslavement, and the helplessness of perpetual misery.  

What's sad is this philosophy attempts to mask itself into something honest, implying that since we can't know moral absolutes, it's best to pretend they don't exist.  As if this philosophy knows what the best of anything is.  Best isn't in its vocabulary, at least not in the rare event that its adherents are being consistent with what they claim to believe.  In this philosophy a lie is not in any way inferior to the truth, but how often do we hear moral nihilists say that?

Abandon moral nihilism and treat it as worthless.  After all, it declares itself to be so.  

Man Created the Integers - All Else is the Work of God

A mathematician named Kronecker once said, "God created the integers, all else is the work of man."  And it's hard for me to imagine how he said that.  He was obviously more advanced at mathematics than I will ever be.  But the properties and results that flow from just a few mathematical rules are just so mind-blowingly unexpected I don't see how one could have argued that they were intentionally created instead of discovered.  

It's very easy to create the concept of an integer, but no one in the world would have thought of the argument principle in complex analysis.  No one would have intentionally created the Basel problem to sum up to its result either.  These were unexpected discoveries that seemed to stem from nature itself.  

Kronecker was apparently something called a constructivist, and I believe most of mathematics has not taken this approach.

Was I Closer to God When I Sinned More?

When I was a young man in my early 20's, I couldn't shake the sin of adult websites, even after several years.  And as awful as that is, despite the rest of the world thinking it's fine, that enslavement did keep me in quite a bit of prayer.  At times I felt like the tax collector in the parable mentioned in Luke 18.  And now sometimes I wonder if I'm more like the pharisee in the parable, which of course isn't a good thing.  I still fall prone to anger and sloth and many other sins, sometimes perhaps worse than the sin I used to do, but I don't pray quite as much for forgiveness now, or even pray as often for any other reason.  I think I primarily pray now for guidance during life's upcoming challenges.

But even if I was closer to God then than I am now, I can't WILLINGLY go back to the sin that God delivered me from 16 or so years ago.  Biblically it would be like a dog returning to its vomit.  That's a path I can't knowingly justify.  It may still happen, but if it does I won't be happy about it and I believe I will be quite devastated.

It kind of reminds me though of my favorite episode of Star Trek The Next Generation, the one titled Tapestry.  Where Picard learns that the unflattering parts of your past are so engrained in your life story that you can't really unravel them, and even if you could it would lead to unexpected and potentially undesirable consequences.  I might have mentioned that episode in this blog before because I love it so much, even though I am not sure if the message is 100% true.

But if I ever need to be reminded of my continued sin, all I need to do is read about turning the other cheek regarding personal affronts.  That's a HARD verse to obey and I definitely know I'm guilty of not obeying it.

Your Effort is More Important than Who You Vote For

Something that puzzles me is the emphasis on who you vote for.  Sure, it's an important decision and should be given due diligence if possible, but is it really more important than the labor your put into your job and your family day in and day out?  You really think pulling a lever once every two years or so can substitute for a requirement like that?  Maybe if your labor is light, or meaningless, then you might have that opinion, but I can't imagine any consistent amount of labor possessing that quality for that long of a span.

Vote for whoever you feel called to vote for, but realize that voting is just one part of your life, and MANY other votes are considered besides yours.  Your vote is your decision, and people have fought and died for you to have the right to decide it.  But don't ever think it can substitute for the other efforts you need to put into your life to be a good and worthwhile citizen.

Believing Magic is Fake Doesn't Add Much IQ

Will your SAT score automatically go up more if you give up your belief in a holy book with magic in it? The answer is no. However, it WILL go up more if you study and practice problems, regardless of your beliefs regarding magic.

You will not master intellectual content unless you expose yourself to it. You can't expect to learn probability or the binomial coefficient just by saying you don't believe in magic. Skepticism is not a substitute for opening a STEM book and absorbing the content within.

Anyone that believes that adopting a "magic is stupid" philosophy is sufficient to rank them among the highest of the high in terms of intellect is being severely misled. Going to take A LOT more than that.

Math and Science Made Me Believe in Miracles More

Events can only be scientifically confirmed when they're a part of a controlled, consistent environment.  Is real life outside of a laboratory ALWAYS controlled and consistent, without exception, as the philosophy of determinism insists?  Impossible to prove, but I would say the odds are not good.  Reality has no obligation to fit inside of the small box of required criteria to always make sense to our nature-created brains.

After studying a bit of the natural sciences over the years, particularly mathematics, I've come to discover that rare, uncontrolled events simply have no part in a scientific experiment.  It's not that they can't possibly exist so much as they can't possibly be detected through the scientific method.  These kinds of events cannot be verified scientifically ever, whether they have the ability to exist or not.

In the admittedly stupid movie titled, "A Talking Cat!?!" the feline protagonist Duffy attempts to help a few mentally lost people with some of their life problems.  He talks to each of them separately, but explains he can only talk to them once, never really giving us a satisfactory explanation of why this is.  Now if a situation like this ACTUALLY happened outside of an imaginary story, the only evidence we'd ever have of it is eyewitness testimony that's not worth believing.  No one can control when Duffy chooses to talk.  For all we know he never spoke to anybody else other than these few dimwits.

So it does help to know the potential limitations of the scientific method as well as its incredible strengths.  It's clearly the best tool we have for understanding the physical aspects of reality, but that alone isn't enough to make it infallible.  Weird and rare events that happen to only a few unreliable people can still potentially pop up without the scientific method ever acknowledging their reality.  Only a deterministic philosophy, which encompasses FAR too much to be proven by empirical methods, places a limit on such possibilities.  

But even if eyewitnesses claim such events occurred, I think I'll be like Arthur C. Clarke and remain skeptical of such claims.