Apparent Math Cryptid

oh right I should probably plug my video about this

that's what responsible youtubers do with their social media platforms right,

wrong answers only: why are you autistic

A character does not almost get beaten to death by a ghost robot. They aren't dead when the robot leaves, but they quickly succumb to their wounds and perish.

Tragic news like half the ways people talk about magic in fiction could irl be applied to maths

"magic is the threads that tie the world together, the unspoken web at the heart of the universe" that's mathematics babey!

You ever think about how when you gauge if it's safe to cross the road based off how fast and far away the cars are you're actually doing difficult calculus subconsciously? Almost like maths is something you have an inherent understanding of in many ways but in order to advance in it and truly understand it you have to learn it in an academic setting? Almost like many magic systems?

This is because many actual historical magical texts are written in the language of mathematical proofs. Many early Greek mathematicians were also mystics and magicians. Geometry, by way of the neoplatonists, played an enormous role in shaping how Renaissance and later victorian occultists would discuss magic. Which, in turn, would go on to influence many fantasy writers.

The Three Books of Occult Philosophy, the most influential magical text of the Renaissance, is directly structurally styled after Euclid's Elements, and spills quite a bit of ink on the topic of the inherent magical properties of numbers.

Hell, in the Monas Hieroglyphica, John Dee explicitly attempts to create a sort of magical semiotic system to unify language and geometry, the two things he considered fundamental to God's creation.

Like, the reason so many fantasy magicians talk about magic like it's math, is because that's straight up how many actual historical magicians talked.

It works the other way around as well. It's not only about Magic being written in the language of Math, but also about Math being the way we approach the wonders of the universe beyond our immediate perception: An experience that can be so full of old-definition awe that if it's not outright Magic it can definitely feel like it.

Look up high enough and so much of this reality is arranged in patterns; from the orbits of celestial bodies, to the way galaxies, and clusters of galaxies are arranged. Go small enough, and neuronal maps resemble these same galaxies; and even in a smaller scale, we talk about orbits to describe the behavior of the particles in atoms (and the particles that make them up). Our bodies are powered (and regulated!) by the same electricity ions produce. Our cognition is powered by it, even! It's all fractals upon fractals. All of it is so "as above so below" it's almost too on the nose.

This is the language the universe is written in (and I wish I had learned it better). If the mathematical model doesn't translate 1:1 it's because it can still be perfected - Wait a couple of decades and someone will come up with a way. There's other problems whose answers have stayed out of reach so far, and scientists who've devoted their life to work on them (wizard behavior, if you ask me). It's not the universe what changes, it's our comprehension of it, but could it be said it's not the way we also harness it?

This is where creative thought can take us - You need it for this, as you would in any art. And if you keep finding out more, and everything fits together, but the things you still don't know are in such an enormous scale they defy comprehension... It's not strange that so many astrophysicists end up finding a sense of mysticism.

In conclusion, to this day we're standing on the shoulders of dudes like Della Porta (Magia Naturalis); Athanasius Kircher speaking of Natural Magic too and expanding on Ramón Llul's math/early-early computer science (drinking from Kabbalah and Muslim math, which is very Catholic of them); Della Mirandolla who was like same hat (except that while catholic, he had the decency of actually learning under Rabbis); and of course the OG Chad Of Chads Agrippa, who wrote the Three Books Of Occult Philosophy the ACTUAL EXPERT (seriously y'all check them out please) Cryptotheism said up there.

Hell. A lot of what we've learnt so far resembles Giordano Bruno's model of an infinite cosmos, full of patterns replicated in every possible scale, shaped by forces consistent through it. His idea of an infinite amount of suns orbited by their planet Earths even influenced the idea of a multiverse in quantum mechanics.

And this... Came to him first as Revealed Truth in a dream.

2022 was the year of pondering orbs

in 2023 we ponder the tricontahexahedron

year of the tricontahexahedron

year of the tricontahexahedron

The pointy math version of this shape is more usually called the small stellated dodecahedron, if anyone's curious. Triacontahexahedron isn't wrong, just unusual.

Right! Apropos another post, let’s talk about lawn crayfish aka The Lobsters Beneath Our Feet!

This is Craw-Bob. He’s about three and a half inches long.

Long ago, when I had only gardened in the Southeast for a year or two, I saw an interesting hole in a flowerbed. It was rather deep and had a muddy front porch. I gazed into this hole, thinking “Ooh! Is it a rodent? A snake? A toad?”

And then I saw…the Claw.

It was unmistakably a crustacean claw. And it was in a hole in my yard. My terrestrial yard! Why was there a crustacean in my flowerbed?!

I could not have been more astounded if an octopus tentacle had come flopping out. I ran screaming for my husband and the internet, both of whom said “Yeah, that’s a lawn crayfish, they do that.”

And yes. There are about 400 species of crayfish* in North America, and a not inconsiderable number of them are burrowing species. The devil crayfish, which builds little mud towers, ranges from the Rockies to the Atlantic and as far north as Ontario. There are a number of other species as well. Some are limited to stream banks, but many burrow in lawns, flowerbeds, and other places with consistently damp soil, which means that there is a non-zero chance that when you wander around the grass, a tiny lobster is lurking somewhere beneath your feet.

You would think that more people would know this, but at no point in my life had anyone ever mentioned it to me.

Being me, I immediately set out to determine if other people knew about lawn crayfish and I had just somehow missed it. I took an informal poll—by which I mean I accosted random strangers at the farmer’s market, the coffee shop, and my doctor’s office—and discovered a stark divide. Half the people looked at me like I was telling them I’d seen a lawn chupacabra and the other half looked at me like I’d asked if they’d ever heard of squirrels.

It was not divided by social class or education. The farmer with the heirloom breed hogs knew about them, his wife did not. My nurse practitioner first thought I was hallucinating, then went out into the clinic, and began demanding to know if her co-workers had heard of this. My barista was like “Yeah, mudbugs,” but he’s from Florida, so may not count.

My theory is that if you know they’re there, it’s just a fact of life so obvious that you don’t bother to comment on it, and if you don’t—well, why would you ever assume that any given hole in the ground comes from a goddamn MINI LOBSTER? And since they mostly just hang out underground during the day and don’t really hurt anything, it just doesn’t come up very often, until one day you’re at the farmer’s market, just trying to sell some organic tomatoes, and a wild-eyed woman with a Studio Ghibli T-shirt descends on you yelling “Are you aware of lawn crayfish?!”

(Yes, they’re edible, but it’s a lot of work popping them individually out of their burrows.)

During torrential rains, they will often leave their burrows and wander around, which is how I got the photos of Craw-Bob. My hound spotted him in the garden and poked him with her nose, whereupon Craw-Bob poked back. Hound, not sure what was happening but that it was probably bad, began doing her “release the humans!” alarm bark, and I came out to find her toe to toe with a crustacean who was waving its claws and presumably screaming “Come on if you think you’re hard enough!” in Lobster.

Despite their willingness to fight everything, they’re pretty harmless. The most they do is move soil from underground to a little pile above. I’m sure golf courses hate them. Our local county extension office suggests “These nonprolific creatures should be appreciated like an interesting bird or turtle living on the property.” Some, like the Greensboro burrowing crayfish, are so rare they were thought to be extinct until somebody found one in the backyard.

So. Lawn crayfish. They exist! And could be lurking underfoot as we speak!

*or crawfish, depending on where you’re from.

That’s fucked up!! Tbh me and Ruth’s first reaction was “check the date, is it an April Fool?”

But, on the other hand, why in the world Not. After all, we saw terrestrial forest CRABS while hiking on a forest trail in Japan:

I asked the host of our minshuku about em as she was driving us to a trailhead later, and she said (translated from Japanese) “oh yeah, sawagani! Little bastards are delicious, you can just grill them with some salt.”

Information on sawagani in English seems to be a little bit thin on the ground.

WHOA that’s new to me!

different viewpoints

bootleg porygon, one for each type! let me know which is your favorite…

This is the COOLEST! I can’t choose. I love them all

Foundlings in the Yukon by A.K. Ramanujan

source: American Poetry Magazine

A few related thoughts on abstraction:

1) One classic way to think about abstraction is as the process of forgetting stuff on purpose. You look at a concrete situation, in all its infinite complexity, and say "ok, for the given problem I'm trying to solve, which of these details do I have to worry about and which can I ignore?" You then pick some to keep and "forget" the rest, and there you have an abstraction. This is both very powerful and very dangerous.

One reason abstraction is powerful is that it can turn intractable problems into tractable ones. The human mind can't possibly keep account of every minute detail of a situation, so if you want to get anything done you have to select a few to focus on and leave the rest for later. A problem that without abstraction would be utterly unsolvable can become manageable with abstraction. As an aside, for this reason, abstraction is also unavoidable. We're abstracting things all the time in our everyday life, and we simply wouldn't be able to process the world around us without doing that. There are people who don't like abstraction, because of the various dangers in it (which I'll get to), but to those people you kinda have to say: tough luck. Abstraction is the bread and butter of human cognition. Or something like that.

Another reason abstraction is powerful is because it allows you to generalize. If you can pick out the salient details in a situation and focus your analysis only on those, then guess what: that analysis will also be useful in all the other situations in which those salient details are the same. Since the minutiae of basically everything differ, if you refuse to abstract at all, you'll be forced to analyze every new question totally from scratch. Abstracting allows you to pass over reasoning from one situation into another, or to reason generally about many situations at once. I hope it goes without saying that this is very useful. It's also another argument for the necessity of abstraction: there are simply too many possible situations, too many questions, for us to think through each one separately with no overlap. Even in a very mundane sense, we need to make generalizations like "chairs can usually be sat on", "bread is usually edible" and so forth to get through the day. Generalization is a prerequisite for thinking about and interacting with the world basically at all. And abstraction is necessary for generalization.

But, ok, abstraction is also very dangerous. It's very dangerous because you're forgetting things on purpose! You're purposely choosing to ignore certain details! What if those details turn out to be relevant? What if ignoring them leads you to terribly wrong conclusions, or totally handicaps your ability to solve your problem? These dangers are not just hypothetical, they often come to pass when we're abstracting. And this is very troubling. This is why some people think we should avoid abstraction, and why they can't be easily dismissed. If abstraction is this incredibly powerful tool, indeed if it's this unavoidable thing that we do, then the fact that it comes with significant inherent dangers is inconvenient, to say the least.

2) So abstraction is this sort of eldritch power, that we'd like to bring to bear on our various questions about the world, but which comes with inherent epistemic risks. What can be done about this? Well, I think one of the principle factors in the success of the sciences is that they've found really good methods of reining in abstraction, of keeping it on a leash, which allows them to apply it in ever more delicate situations where unmitigated abstraction would fail spectacularly.

For instance, take mathematical formalism (not the philosophical school, but formalism as in "a formalism"—i.e. rigor). Mathematical formalism is, I think, maybe the single most powerful leash on abstraction that humanity has ever devised. In mathematics, we take these incredibly out-there ideas about logic and space and structure, and translate them into a formal game of symbols that we can play on a page. Big questions about the nature of reality are turned into small questions about pluses and sigmas and epsilons. And even when mathematicians are thinking post-rigorously—using abstraction in its full power—this formalism acts as a check on just how much it can run amok.

Mathematical formalism is so powerful, in fact, that it rules out the vast majority of abstractions we make in everyday life. "Chairs can usually be sat in", and "bread is usually edible" don't stand up to its very high standard. In fact, no empirical observations stand up to its very high standard! Once this formalism has been applied, only the abstractions that we can really control remain, those bound indelibly by logic. Everything else is blasted away. This lets us apply abstraction in ever more complex ways in mathematics, where in other fields we'd lose control of it. So we tend to think of mathematics as a very abstract field, but I think this framing leaves the most important part out! Mathematics might be better understood as a field that could become very abstract while staying productive, because its abstraction-leashing tools are so powerful.

In contrast (I know this sounds contentious, but hear me out), I think philosophy is what happens when you give yourself no abstraction-leashing tools at all. And, look, I like philosophy a lot (in fact, I'm doing philosophy right now!), but the thing about philosophy is that it's really easy for philosophy to be bullshit. There's a lot of really great philosophy out there, but there's also a lot of... total nonsense. Words on page. Just absolute blabber. Why? Well, maybe one reason is that a lot of philosophy seems to set up some abstractions and then let them totally run amok, ride them wherever they go, just go wild with it. And this is really fun, it's what like half of my posts are. But it often leads to nonsense, to just saying a bunch of words that mean almost nothing at all. You're out in abstraction land and your connection to the real world has been totally severed.

Perhaps that's another way to think about abstraction-leashing, as a sort of tether between the abstraction and the real world. You need some kind of wire, hooking your abstractions way up in the sky to concrete things here on the ground, so that all the convolutions going on way up there can be translated into something actionable down here. Without some sort of tether, some translation scheme to turn abstract into concrete and vice-versa, your abstraction doesn't do much good. It just floats around up there, disconnected, not able to actually say anything. And because you're a concrete being who ultimately can only take concrete actions (of which even thought is a subset), I'm tempted to say that you can't even meaningfully interact with an abstraction that lacks a proper translation scheme. You can solve a math problem by shuffling symbols, that's something you can do. But in philosophy you have all these intractable problems, and it looks to me like one of the main reasons for their intractability is that you can't "get at them" the way you can "get at" math. You have no tether, no way of concretely interacting with the objects and ideas under consideration, so they just kind of aimlessly float around.

3) So anyway, I'd like a name for these tethers, these abstraction-leashes. And I think a good one is "concretization schemes". A concretization scheme is a method for translating between the elements and conclusions of your abstraction on the one hand, and the concrete elements of your immediate experience (things you can see and do, etc.) on the other hand.

The concretization scheme in mathematics is mathematical formalism. The concretization scheme in physics is measurement. Actually there's a quote, which I think I saw in Spivak's Physics for Mathematicians, that's something like "In mathematics we introduce new primitives by providing axioms for their behavior. In physics we introduce new primitives by defining a process for measuring them." That's exactly what I'm talking about. That's laying down a concretization scheme.

In general, measurement and experiment are the concretization schemes for the sciences, but I think it's important to distinguish this concretizing role (whose primary function is, in some sense, to give the abstraction meaning) from the epistemic role of experiment (whose primary function is to check whether a theory is predictive). But these things are maybe somewhat inextricable, since giving meaning to an abstraction often means giving truth conditions, and giving truth conditions is often inextricable from having a specific way to check truth conditions. So I think it's fair to say that truth-checking procedures are often a fundamental part of concretizing, of reining in abstractions, but they don't in principle have to be.

Here are some more diverse examples. I think the concretizing scheme in language learning is speaking, reading, listening and so on. You turn abstract grammatical concepts into something specific you can do with people, and thereby get (implicit and explicit) feedback and can appropriately modify the abstractions in your head, etc. The concretization scheme for these same abstractions (grammar) in linguistics is a bit different—it should be measurement and experiment—because linguistics is aiming to be a science. So the same abstractions can have different schemes for different ends. A lot of good philosophy has a concretization scheme burried in it somewhere, like a lot of philosophy of science is concretized in actually performing various different scientific methodologies. And so on.

What the sneef? I'm snorfin' here!

Hey? You doin alright @ghost--bot ??

So how much trouble would I be asking for if one of the prefixes in the expanded Space Gerbils mech suit systems table was “vibro”?

@paradoxius replied;

The “grip” suffix is probably going to be replaced with “gauntlet” in the final table, and I submit that “vibro-gauntlet” is, at the very least, not inherently questionable.

For reference:

(If anyone has any suggestions for the last five presently unfilled slots in each column, feel free to toss them in!)

The finished table, if anyone wanted to give it a proper spin:

Special thanks to @acelania, @amashelle, @augmentalize, @bockusthegreatandpowerful, @clockworparadox, @coolclaytony, @deluxeloy, @dontneedaclassroom, @mistershinyobject, @papervolcano, @rainfallinhell​, @rtrb1, @scrumpyfan43 and @the-manwich-horror for their contributions – and Grond almighty, I recognise that I have an ethical obligation to give credit where credit is due and therefore have no legitimate grounds for complaint, but some of y’all are not making your usernames easy to spell!

On the chart, vibro lines up with thruster. Maybe reverse-alphabetical for one of the lists to separate those?

At no point did I specify that the goal of these revisions was to avoid suggestive results.

It's only today you'll be given a name

And this is why you make sure you get a different thermos for a different job