1 - (-1) OR (-1) - 1

While lying on my bed, I became intrigued by plus one and minus one and what happens to them.  For example, pairs can be made in four ways, pp, pm, mp, mm.  If we are multiplying the numbers, the result is obviously one or the other.  If they are the same pp or mm, they end up p, but if they are different, either mp or pm, then they end up m.  This seems obvious.

In the general case instances of two qualities can be paired under an operation four ways.  The result is a single one of them and which one depends on whether they are the same or different.  But is this always so?

This gives the intuitively right number of answers: two of each.  Totalling two ones, two, and two minus ones, minus two.

Take parenting with the two sexes.  Partnerships of the same sex produce no offspring, the result is not m or p, but a zero.  In the previous general example, there was no zero.

So what is the mathematical generalisation of this case?  If we take the plus one and minus one but instead of multiplying them, we subtract them, we end up with p-p=0, m-m=0, p-m=2, m-p=-2.   Why marriage should be equivalent to the operation of subtraction is not clear.  Perhaps when two people cleave to each other they cancel out their individuality in the way two oxygen atoms make a neutral molecule where a single one is charged.  If we add the numbers instead of subtracting, we end up with the result that two ps will produce another two ps and two ms similarly, while the mixed pair produces nothing.  It is clearly the wrong model for marriage, but perhaps arbitrarily so.  With division, the result is the same as for multiplication. 

The Prophet (pbuh)

New Whig has been almost silent for a while because the same issues persist unresolved, and this voice is too tiny to have any influence, despite apparently having half a thousand likes.  They will all work themselves out in due course. 

The issue of “free speech” versus Insulting the Prophet (pbuh) has been commented on here before.  New Whig has always endorsed Islam as one of the great faith systems of human history.  It currently gives meaning to the lives of about a quarter of humanity, and is likely to do so for centuries to come, in some form or another, preferably in harmony with other social systems.

Do we have the right to judge other people by our own standards?  If they affect us we certainly do.

“World Peace” may not ever be achievable.  War might be hard-coded into our DNA.  Neural networks appear to be inherent, perhaps through the switching mechanism included in the twisted strands.  We must aim for an international system that has institutionalised combat to safeguarded the innocent and the non-combatant. 

The division within Islam developed very yearly and survived because it served a useful purpose.  The pre-Islamic tribal nations of Arabia fought each other as did all ancient city-states, including nomadic ones.  The Prophet (pbuh) united that internecine strife towards the single purpose of spreading the faith, using conversion by the sword, the natural inclination of the newly converted tribal armies.  However, this exponential growth quickly expanded to its limit, at which point another barrier needed to be found to provide the front line of battle, and that is the internal division.  Perhaps this surface, brane, or whatever needs to be enforced and ritualised, so that it happens away from civilians.  War always was a good Economic driver, and perhaps should not be opposed on ideological grounds, just because other solutions are difficult.

New Whig takes a mechanical view of society so that principles of fluid dynamics can be observed when sufficiently large numbers of people mean individuals are elements of a larger social system in the way individual water molecules cease to matter in water flowing. 

Another issue persists when it is long overdue for hibernation that needs another post here: The Australian Monarchy.

HRH the Prince of Wales will make the most excellent King, but probably not for another decade.  By then, HRH the Duchess of Cornwall will have achieved the level of popularity that will ensure they will be crowned together with popular acclamation.  Hopefully, by then, the world will have solved its present problems and we will enter a new age, perhaps a Georgian revival, before Napoleon made a mess of things, with a new King George.

There is no risk that any new king will repeat any of his boyish indiscretions.  Look at Henry IV Part one.  Look at Murder in the Cathedral.  Once a person takes on a job, they become that job more than they are themselves.  One of the reasons for the complex Coronation ceremony is that it ensures that whoever the person was before, they will in their own minds believe themselves to be the job, not the former person.  It is a way of sanitising the top job, though it clearly does not always work. 

We live in a complex, global society that has only recently become fully, internationally connected.  It is as if huge tanks of water that previously had little, restricted pipes connecting them suddenly had the sluice gates opened, and the huge rush of water back and forth becomes very unstable for a while.  This is also seen in petrol tanks and holds that don’t have internal baffles where the end result is to be completely lop-sided with everything on one side.  If our international community does not achieve balance, the same will happen with a single continent dominating the world for centuries to come.  We must be optimistic, but realistically accept that it will still take some time, perhaps another couple of decades. 

Different sub-systems within the Global Economy react at different rates and at different times. 

Societies are living organisms in their own right, probably with a level of consciousness that we, as components, can only speculate about; just as our individual cells cannot know what we as an individual are thinking; and how some insects can have a collective memory and intelligence that is clearly far beyond the capacity of any individual ant or bee.  The behaviour of many organisms can only be explained as part of a larger ecosystem.  This over-consciousness is invisible to its components.  Societies of any species are examples, and people are no different from ants or bees in creating our own single-species ecosystem, which we call “society”, or “the community”, or define in demographic terms as a “city”. 

[It always intrigued that DNA seemed like a recipe book for the building blocks, but there seemed to be no “plan”.  How did any cell know what it was supposed to do?  Why would some cells become what they were, close to other similar cells in an organ?  There is no “plan”, that is virtual. What exists are switches.  The process to achieve it is coded in, not a description of what it is to be.  The more contemplation that is given to the wonders of existence, the more wonderful it becomes.]

Does going into hospital make you sick? - BBC News

Does going into hospital make you sick? - BBC News

ATO’s “Digital by Default”

Thank you for the opportunity to comment on the ATO’s “Digital by Default”.  While the title is clear and almost non-threatening, the use of the word “digital” is old fashioned and still focuses on the whiz-bang new electronic technology from the end of last century instead of moving on. 

We are moving into the era of Cyber-existence, now we all have access to the infinite universe of CyberSpace.  The InterNet is the structure of connectivity, but CyberSpace is the “reality” that exists using the InterNet for connectivity, and consists of the combination of everyone’s minds united by the digital technology that is no longer newly fashionable nor particularly significant.

What the ATO is presumably doing, though it might be a process that is not deliberate or official, is not just to continue collecting the same taxes but in a new digital way, but to make the tax system applicable to the new era of vastly expanded activity that is mostly taking place within CyberSpace, the virtual universe that has been created out of imagination. 

The real world is becoming an adjunct to this new Cyber Universe.  That is where most business transactions now take place and where a lot of Labour (that is mental but obviously not physical) takes place.  It is growing exponentially and has the capacity to do so without end, but we are just in the early stages as of right now.

An important point concerns hard copy.  When the digital age started, back in the eighties of last century, or earlier depending on how you write recent history,  we were promised the “paper-less office”.  This was when the expectation was that everything in office procedure would remain the same, except that it would happen digitally and not require paper.

Everyone I speak to now jokes about this because of course there is far more paper now.  Even if bills and Solicitors’ Letters arrive electronically, they still need to be printed out.  All that has changed is the person baring the cost, now the recipient, instead of as previously the sender.  However, what has changed is the number of possible reports that can be generated.   Everything has become vastly more complex, and faster, but it has not become paper-less.

The mathematical model is a five-dimensional cyber space, in which our four dimensional real world is embedded like islands poking up over the ocean from a hidden world below.  Part of the real world manifestation is paper documents.  They are the outgrowth of the cyber world that is indeed digital, but it would be wrong to confine our real world to try to exists totally within the virtual world of Cyber Tax and Cyber Government.

There is another consideration for the rapidly approaching future that the ATO should consider as a branch of Government.   The bigger and stronger it gets, the more robust the InterNet becomes and so the more secure is the Cyber Universe.  However it is early days yet, and there could yet be a major collapse in the InterNet and all other forms of electronic and digital technology.  This could come from a natural cause like a major solar flare, or from something anthropogenic  like terrorism or Big Power competition.  There should be a skeleton of non-digital systems to enable re-growth if this happens.

Security is perhaps the greatest risk.  Tax Payers’ personal information will be less secure, the more “digital” the system become.

My biggest criticism is the absurdity of it all.  The Cost of Compliance is enormous.   “Digital” may well be read by taxpayers as code for “detailed surveillance”.  Our Tax System is based on an outdated business model, where everything is examined to make sure it is correct, where business systems in recent decades only look for what is out of the ordinary and examine those exceptions only.  Only those people whose net income suddenly changes or is outside the normal range for their categorisation need the attention of the ATO.  The rest of us should be relieved of much of the burden of compliance. 

At some point computing will cease to be “digital” again where continuous variations in potential will replace the binary up/down of digital computing, and where multiple variable frequencies will be superimposed as in a hologram, but all that is far in the future.

Eventually what happens in CyberSpace will be outside the control of the ATO whether it is digital or not.   This has already happened with the big global companies who shift their income to low tax havens, but will happen more in the future and especially for on line services rather than for coffee or hamburgers which still have a real component to the virtual, corporate world.

I know none of this will be of the slightest interest to anyone at the ATO, and will probably be ignored be the first person who looks at it.  Unless I publish it elsewhere as well, after a suitable time for response from the ATO, as if there would be one.  [At this point I laugh hysterically at my own fantasy of actually being read.] 

chronic afflictions.

Dear Rabbi,

I suffer greatly from many chronic afflictions.   Often, while lying in agony I wonder if I am not being punished for my wickedness, being a person who regularly desecrates the Sabbath and transgresses all the other laws of the Law.

Why? Do you ask that?  And why am I writing this (on a Sunday)?

Enclosed is a copy of a poem I wrote some time ago when I was pondering the issue.

How Religion accommodates Modernity is a major concern.  While purists can live in contact with the Modern World may satisfy a core or true believers, there are many people in the community who are bound up, for any number of reasons, in the Modern World that makes total observance impossible.

The “all or nothing” approach of Orthodox Judaism has twice in recent decades put me off what had become regular attendance and home compliance, that was almost complete, lacking only a final, personal commitment and for some reason that I did not know how to do and having reached the edge of the precipice and then not jumping, I slowly backed away and retreated till what was almost “all” became “nothing”.

This poem expresses the idea that if one feels one must transgress and desecrate the Sabbath, then one should do it mindfully.  The double commandment to both remember and keep the Sabbath means that people should not live within such a “fence” that they keep the Sabbath in every detail without any awareness of.  This does permit the experience of pure delight but while it is unblemished in keeping the Sabbath, it is easy to lose mental awareness that what one is doing is actually keeping the Sabbath, thereby not remembering.   Is keeping but not remembering, any better than remembering but not keeping?

Many things in the Torah have two versions, from Creation on.  It is a poetic work, where different versions of the same story make a balanced pair of views that contain the truth between them, as if a photograph were taken from two sides of something, so it looked a bit different in each.   So the two versions of the fourth commandment may be an example of this, in what to the writer(s) must have been the crucial, quotable part of the whole.  Perhaps one day the Stone Tablets will be found, still in the Arc that was hidden away before the destruction of the First Temple and never found and restored for the Second.   New ground-piercing vision technology that can find hidden rooms in rock tombs will eventually find hidden caves in mountains.   

The people who claim the Torah is compiled from various sources use the different versions as supposed evidence that different versions of the stories were concatenated.  However, if one of the most important commandments can exist in different forms, from the same hand, then surely so can all the rest.  It is amazing that someone could tell the story in this poetic way, rather than assume it is just the consequence of multiple versions.