Random Caribbean thoughts

Cliff-jumping in Negril, Western Jamaica, being surreptitiously offered ganja on the 'hip-strip' and learning patois......some of us have a hard life here in Mo' Bay, which seems a long way from the cares of the world right now. Yet, the chill of harsher realities have a habit of making their presence felt. Jamaica has two faces. One, which the tourists see, is colourful, vibrant and over-confident. The other which few tourists get to see, is of a nation lacking in self esteem, young in many aspects of world-scene issues, and daily facing difficult moral choices. A friend had her car stolen by the simple expedient of the thief and accomplice waiting beside her car port and demanding the keys yesterday. The existence of resort hotels which cocoon visitors inside gated, secure environments, buttresses them against the harsher economic realities and consequent civil disobedience in a nation whose primary income is from tourism.

When away, I do like to keep abreast of other issues thus I'm in the middle of reading a history of al-Qaeda, if such exists any more. A friend in Jerusalem found herself uncomfortably close to the recent terror and a child known to her was killed. The authors of mayhem against the West have not gone away, neither are they sleeping. Reading between the lines recently - a subtle pastime when it comes to the McCain/Obama race - American Jewry seems to be getting behind the safer horse. Obama's sense of what is historically relevant translates into a delusion that radical Islamic terror can be pacified solely with financial and diplomatic pressure. You can't see the whites of their eyes, much less curtail their activities by ham-fisted 'westernised' methods. If he doesn't understand this then one fears he might have to learn the hard way.

Back to the present. Negril's cliffs are anything from 35 to 45 ft high, dependent on who one asks. A jump from the highest one is a brief but satisfying adrenalin rush.....When asking ' how deep is the water' the response 'deep enuff, mon' is strangely comforting.

Clarity and Mechanics

It has been said of me that my posts are too longwinded, linguistically labyrinthine ( I like that) and incomprehensible in consequence.

I thought that gentle readers might like to see an entry I posted elsewhere some time ago which flies in the face of such nonsense, 'cause I like teaching people stuff.

If you've found your way here, you're either curious or suicidal about not passing a midterm. Relax. Whatever you need to know, it's here. If it ain't it soon will be when you tell me what you need. I'll try to minimise the math and optimise concept grasp. I'll be putting together stuff about mechanics, waves, electricity, heat and radioactivity to start with. It's a work in progress, you tell me what you need to know and I'll put it together for you. OK?

Dear old Uncle Albert failed his exams to Zurich Polytechnic first time around, so, as the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy says....don't panic.

The clock's there because I know you don't feel comfortable in class unless you have one to watch.

Ten Thousand Places

One's children fill one with surprise on so many levels. One of mine is a mathematician, outwardly cold, number-clad, inured to emotional depth, one might suppose. He sent me this which I found utterly and compellingly beautiful.

I haven't read it since I was at school.

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;

As tumbled over rim and roundy wells

Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's

Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

Selves- goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,

Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

I say more: the just man justices;

Keeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;

Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is--Chríst.

For Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men's faces.

Gruel for the Soul

I asked for a day off next week, for quite an important function - indeed one where my presence is mandatory.
The establishment which pays my salary - some call it a school - first asked me to fill out a form. Quite right. Entirely reasonable. No details of why I require time out is evident for completion.
The Principal - beige and uninspiring - coughed sheepishly behind me today and told me that I would have to write a letter requesting that in his magnanimity, the Personnel Manager might be kind enough to give me the day off, but, of course, could not pay me.
I have rescheduled my groups to another occasion when I am present, thus not a ripple disturbs the chaos of the day.
I remember in the sixties when my father was a personnel director and the unions were more than usually hairy-chested, how he bemoaned the 'work to rule' policies and 'working without enthusiasm' that resulted. It seems that people here are so accustomed to working to rule that the alternative of an environment where a well-motivated, productive and happy workforce goes above and beyond, simply because they want to, simply does not occur to them. Thomas Gradgrind, above, whose little vessels were arranged in order, ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim, would have been proud.

I'm reminded of a method of working out the sum total of pleasure and pain produced by an act, and thus the total value of its consequences; aka hedonic calculus. When determining what action is right in a given situation, we should consider the pleasures and pains resulting from it, in respect of their intensity, duration, certainty, propinquity, fecundity (the chance that a pleasure is followed by other ones, a pain by further pains), purity (the chance that pleasure is followed by pains and vice versa), and extent (the number of persons affected). We should next consider the alternative courses of action: ideally, this method will determine which act has the best tendency, and therefore is right. In 1789, Bentham envisaged the calculus could be used for criminal law reform: given a crime of a certain kind it would be possible to work out the minimum penalty necessary for its prevention. Spectacularly misleading, uninformed, grandiose in its stupidity. In other words, horseshit. But, it's the way this place operates. It's no wonder that this country, so rich in the things of the world, is emotionally and psychologically impoverished to the point of destitution.

Bumps in the Darkness

The Indian physicist Sidharth (I liked the syllabic connotation) suggests that space and time are granular like free flowing sugar, not continuous like golden syrup, at their smallest scales. He discusses how the quantisation of time - the existence of the chronon as time’s smallest quantum - leads to an explanation of the arrow of time. Perhaps the chronon is only able to face one way in the 'real' world.

This quantised spacetime is fuzzy, underlain with the order of fractal geometry - a new way of 'looking at the world' were it possible.

Such bumpy fractal spacetime’s road maps is not familiar Euclidean geometry. Quantized fractal spacetime is non-Archimedean, or ultrametric: lengths and distances cannot be measured with a ruler. How far is it between 3 and 5? I live in Kuwait and feel close to Esther, who lives in England. What do we mean when we say "close" or "far"? In mathematics, we're used to using "real" distances x-y, but there are others, which are called "p-adic" and measure the common 'factors' two numbers have. We don't measure p-adic distances in kilometres, they are more like the distance between people on a family tree, where brothers and sisters are close to each other and cousins are further away. So, this quantized fractal spacetime is also noncommutative: its geometry, its spacetime, is not flat or ordered according to our usual formulas of geometry and algebra. The image is of a 3-adic tetrad, showing crystal planes and their 'nearness'.

Funny old world, innit.............

Architectural Digest

I am discovering that I am not a visual learner. It's ironic that if the kids I teach are turned loose on a project of some kind, their first response is to make a movie or otherwise engage me visually, which elicits childlike clapping of the hands since it's all so fearfully clever and so easy to do. The old dinosaur still labours under the delusion that words and, heaven forfend, their actual meaning carries artistry, however quaint.
Some CGI's fascinate me, however. This room suggests Zen-like tranquillity, existing as it does in my pixellated imagination. I should like to sleep here.

Fire and Water

Well, the ageing pontiff is under fire again, this time for baptising the outspoken anti Islamic journalist, Magdi Allam at a rather public affair on Easter Sunday in St Peter's Basilica. Allam has never been one for secreting his fire under a hedgerow, which has, predictably, earned him apostate status and consequent death threats, in addition to those from Hamas in 2003. To Western eyes, this is of course mediaeval, barbaric and unnecessary, but to the radical Islamist, the application of Shari'a is as natural as breathing. Allam was a self-confessed Muslim Zionist, an oxymoron of sorts, but subtly identified a hatred of Israel as the root of many of the evils plaguing the Muslim world and describes Israel as 'the paradigm of the right to life.' I rather like that, since it is the antithesis of the trendy leftist chattering classes' view that if only Israel went away, everything would settle down in the Middle East. Ha! The demographics are disturbing. Christian presence in traditionally Biblical landscapes is declining, many finding safer and less hostile havens elsewhere in the world- a second hijra, if you will. Lebanon's Christian majority has dwindled, having almost 70% Muslims, and the population of Bethlehem, once 95% Christian is less than a quarter of that today. I hate to suggest it, but it does rather look as if battle lines are being drawn again.