Where did the mathestate blog logo come from?
Where did the mathestate blog logo come from?
Suppose you want to find out where you are on the political spectrum. Easy! As everyone knows you must either be a bleeding heart liberal or a greedy capitalist conservative. Thus, you pick one of the arrowheads you see below and start fighting...
But, suppose you object to being pigeonholed into a one dimensional object. You like to get along with those around you. You think of yourself as a moderate with equal, tempered, amounts of both philosophies. The plot below is you, consistent rise-over-run, x vs y equality, across two and up two, across four and up four on to infinity. You are the soul of compromise in all respects.
Well, OK, perhaps you have a little bias in one direction or the other. There are times when you simply cannot endure one particular position and veer toward the left (or right). The “you” below has more personality, more fighting spirit. You take a stand.
Then, there are days when you have wide swings of temperament. Some days you are liberal, others conservative. Your friends offer to share their Lithium with you. Some days you just cannot decide. Below, as the slider moves you introduce just the right dose of extremism to fit your mood at the moment. Notice the number to the right of the slider. It changes with the lines of the plot. This is a central theme of the mathestate blog. We care about how things are measured, what values we put on things, how different choices lead to different measurable outcomes.
All we have seen so far are one- and two-dimensional illustrations of choices. Even with those limitations we have some flexibility. How about higher dimensions? Humanoids are endowed with brains that can only visualize three dimensions. The mathestate blog logo is a three dimensional plot. This considerably expands things. The number of combinations quickly increase (probably the cube of something?) Beyond what we can do with pictures, there are abstractions that, while not possible to graph, expand into an infinite number of dimensions. The point is that while politicians constrain you to two dimensions and your Creator thoughtlessly constrained your field of perception to three, NATURE actually offers an infinite number of dimensions. We want to pay attention to Nature. The trouble starts when politicians pass laws in 2D space that attempt to repeal infinite Laws of Nature. Anticipating that trouble means measuring a lot of things in Nature which must coexist alongside man’s laws. To survive you need to understand the difference. That is what we do here.
What we also need is a way to measure things so that we can make sense of the numbers along each axis. That is what the mathestate blog is about. We want to measure things so we can make rational decisions about our choices in life.
So, let’s just explore the possibilities for a moment. Suppose our odd shaped surface represents all the feasible or affordable choices in the sea of alternatives possible. Perhaps we want to know the area of that surface. We can measure it. It is a nasty geometry problem but we have computers and wonder what they are for. This is a good thing to use your computer for when you are not watching cat videos on YouTube. (If you can’t stand the suspense, the area is 6).
Now suppose you are building a very modern house and your designer recommends a swimming pool with a bottom shaped like our object. You need to know how to scale the pool equipment to handle the water supply, flow and temperature. Not a hard engineering problem, you need the volume. In essence, this means putting a “top” on the graphic where the waterline will be and measuring how much it takes to fill it up. No problem. Here is your pool, with the volume.
So, let’s just explore the possibilities for a moment. Suppose our odd shaped surface represents all the feasible or affordable choices in the sea of alternatives possible. Perhaps we want to know the area of that surface. We can measure it. It is a nasty geometry problem but we have computers and wonder what they are for. This is a good thing to use your computer for when you are not watching cat videos on YouTube. (If you can’t stand the suspense, the area is 6).
Now suppose you are building a very modern house and your designer recommends a swimming pool with a bottom shaped like our object. You need to know how to scale the pool equipment to handle the water supply, flow and temperature. Not a hard engineering problem, you need the volume. In essence, this means putting a “top” on the graphic where the waterline will be and measuring how much it takes to fill it up. No problem. Here is your pool, with the volume.
One last thought, this will be a stretch but just go with me for a minute. Suppose you are not happy with any choice you face and you want another route to happiness. Suppose that the z axis, the vertical one that measures “depth” (which above is labeled “ALT” for alternative), represents how happy you would be with another (better?) choice. Wouldn’t it be useful to know how much happier you would be? I realize that measuring happiness (what are those units “happs”?) sounds hard. But life is hard and one reason is that we are faced with a blizzard of choices every day, every minute. Each of those cry out for a method to compare them. Measurement is one answer.
If I have any success in this adventure, the mathestate blog will present some useful ways to measure things you can use to reach rational choices, make good decisions and be happier.
mathestate - Taking the Luck out of Living
If I have any success in this adventure, the mathestate blog will present some useful ways to measure things you can use to reach rational choices, make good decisions and be happier.
mathestate - Taking the Luck out of Living