Alla inlägg under juni 2008

Av dennis hägglund - 18 juni 2008 06:49

If you wish to proceed using your own slide-show as per below, rather than waiting until I have put one together, the second experiment is simple enough to describe. Perhaps your own logic will make some adjustments/improvements.


First we need to show centrifugal force. Simple. A string and a weight. This is to show that the Earth and other planets and plastic celestial bodies that are spinning are flattened, so that they are fat around the equator, or so that the distance through the centre from equator to equator is much longer than the distance from pole to pole.


Second we need to show how things can be twisted by this force. We know that a swing with one rope longer than the other will not ride evenly. What we need is two strings looped at one end. A stick or pencil to serve as the top of the swing, and something to serve as the seat. We make this little doll size swing do loop-the-loops, over the top several times, and with one string longer than the other the strings will twist predictably. And if we turn the swing around so that the other string is longer it twists the opposite way.


Third we want to show that a weight dangling perpendicularly from a pole of a globe that is flattened sees a smaller outline or silhouette of the planet or body if the string is longer. This can probably be done with just a diagram, although a more interesting demonstration might be of value.


Fourth we want to have it understood by the students that the first thing we recognise chronologically about the evolvement of the universe we live in is a dispersal of hydrogen and perhaps helium atoms, the simplest atoms. These atoms filled the space we now occupy and there was nothing else on that scale or larger around.


That these atoms also had to grow from something is plain enough, but the fractal microcosm is another study, and not really required for this experiment, except to say that gravity is not limited to any size particle, the iterations of the atom being exponentially separated, so that the search for the graviton would seem rather an ambitious place to start. Needless to say, these primary atoms did find each other attracting.


Fifth we show the students that the water will always select to go down a drain twisting in the same direction.


We are not teaching physics to these children. This is about spontaneous discovery. We want to minimize the role of teacher. We want to eliminate the pride of knowing. Make a vacuum of teaching and see if there is some hope that this will bring out the eagerness to discover rather than the irrational conditioned reflex to know. We also do not approve of those who discover; we eliminate the reward gimmick. Discovery is its own reward. Discovery, not a reward, is what we want to share, or it isn't discovery. And we don't want the next person to know it, but to discover it.


Next, of course, we present the slide-show, letting the students control the next and previous buttons if possible.

Av dennis hägglund - 18 juni 2008 03:07

The second Discovery Moment experiment involves some pictures, although not in the same way. I will be putting a slide show on a site, and you can just collect it. But some people are shy about clicking on a .zip or and .exe file, and I have made the pictures 1024x768, to fit most tellys and monitors, wjile there are much larger files on the web. In either case, I suggest you collect images from the web yourself using the following search words: hurricans, typhoons, tornados, dust devils, whirlpools, galaxies and the planets with the rings. I have personally used a downloader called Grab JPG, which is free and flawless for 15 days. If you have a budget processor like mine you can't let it get too far ahead of itself, say past 1000 images in one search. I also recommend XNView, as an image managing tool, also free, but no time limit. The .exe files, self-executing slide shows, I make come from there. If you ae having trouble with your Google, I suggest Alta Vista and Dogpile, which I have put in links to.

Av dennis hägglund - 17 juni 2008 06:44

The conscious will not grasp what there is to be without conscious activity. It sees two prospects: being the conscious or being empty of living. The flame we are fanning back to life is estranged to human life. We would not be having human life as we know it if this flame had been kept high.


There is a part of us that knows where the moon and the sun are, these being important to perfect balance. There is a part of us that composes our laughter, and as it is a composer, obviously it also listens to laughter as meaning, which means listening to and comparing nuances that could barely, if at all, be measured by the most sophisticated modern instruments. There is a language hidden in laughter compared to which human language with all its fine synonyms pales to invisibility. In other words, there is an animal sleeping while conscious imposes itself on the waking hours, and this animal will actually make friends with other species perpetually, meaning other species will make friends with it the instant they spot it (not meaning they will behave as if tame).


("It” is a nice pronoun, isn’t it? Better than saying "he” all the time, meaning he or she, or in Scandinavia, saying "she” all the time.)


Why are small children so sensitive? We have to restrict their film viewing to Winnie The Pooh, and keep a careful eye on Winnie, in case he should get too crude. It is because children that age make friends universally; friend is another word for any life. If you feed the child chicken you make sure he doesn’t first meet the hen, or you’ll have a holocaust scene at the table. This becomes a weakness only in the pet shop, when the adoption instinct takes charge. And of course in the world of evil! How does one explain to a child that since paradise there has been this plague spreading over the planet, and it’s his own species? The crimes against children are numerous, and yet they can’t suspect the existence of them at first. They have a notion that only God can have children, but in conscious we have a usurper to the throne of entity, the delusion of entity. And this delusion has children (and infects other species). Without it none of us would.


When we are grown up we have the sense to suspect some things of some people, but since everyone becomes a consummate actor around puberty this is an extremely limited sense. Mostly people are about as attuned to human reality as Winnie The Pooh. We have wandered through the world looking at the facades of respectability, never learning to penetrate them. It is in this accumulated experience of facades that conscious takes form. It is "life” in the "world” having deposed or dethroned Life in the World.


Now we have a couple of experiments which hopefully many people will have a chance to perform. Discovery is the purpose, and hence the mind must be free of conclusions. Something will show up that we couldn’t anticipate.


Discovery Moment, in psychological research, is the study of a peak in brain activity that occurs when something we are looking at suddenly makes perfect sense to us. The duration of the peak is very short. The most memorable example of the pictures we saw on SVT when it presented the study was perhaps a photo of a room where everything is white with rather random black irregular spots. At first we don’t see anything but white with spots; we assume it is just a pattern. Finally, after coming back to it a few times, we realise there is a Dalmatian dog sitting in the picture in a room furnished to match its coat. It’s a photo of a dog that wasn’t there to the viewers first effort to understand the picture.


Most of my art is discovery moment oriented. It is complex and specific, while, at first, the viewer often assumes it is just stylised doodles. What I am hoping you will find time to do is "Comparative Discovery Moment” with children. Look at the images together with the children, preferably a whole class because we prefer diversity, and with a minimum of discussion. All the children know is that no one knows what each picture is a picture of. You start together, so that you also don't know, and never look at the images except together. The images are always right side up, and you access them by using the URL at the bottom. When a child is sure, just to himself, that he has seen clearly what the picture is, he lets you know, writes it down if he is old enough, but doesn't tell anyone, so that each one has a chance to find out in his own time.


I have labelled only one image, which I expect to upload today, because "Poison Ivy" doesn't grow in Sweden. It's a gorgeous vine when it turns red, clinging to trees like part of them. Like nettles, one has to watch out for it unless one is immune, which a fair minority are.


In some cases the discovery may take days, and in others some child or children may discover the images on the first try. Once you have discovered them it is hard to believe they are not obvious to everyone. Be careful not to make any sign of disbelieving the child when he declares what he sees, if you yourself haven't seen it yet or can't see what he says he sees. He could draw you a picture of it, but what we want is just a list of what each child says and approximately how long he has been looking at it when he says it.


Each image is like a sentence, saying exactly what it says and in no way failing to say only and exactly that. These are not like inkblots, where they merely remind you of something.


There are two Discovery Moment experiments, one with my pictures and one with astronomy. I’ll be adding images to the fws1 website, maybe improving the presentation. Hopefully I will even put up some pertinent astronomy images before long. So if you catch this on the day I first post it, don’t despair.


http://lil0.fws1.com/


A few more images: http://picasaweb.google.com/DrDplEmuvd/Art

Av dennis hägglund - 16 juni 2008 02:59

We are engaged in a process of discovery. Ironically, it is the discovery of reality. We find man in the absurd situation of being unable to grasp reality. Astronomers make the world of knowledge larger every day, but man, including astronomers, still prefers an unchanging place called conscious, where even "the one God” is so small he wants to consult with us, like Santa Claus, and where even this God can’t watch us flimflamming him because the process is private and he is as unsuspecting as the rest of those in our addled and sabotaged experience.


We understand some basic rights. The nature of thinking is to formulate falsehoods for effect, while a child has a right to unpolluted truth. Where the law sides with the liar there is no law. To teach children and to imprint something on them must be done without destroying or diminishing the gifts they are born with, and if a teacher or neighbour finds these gifts damaged he has a right to show the child how it was done. He has a right to expose family, friends, leaders, clergy, books, doctors, etc. Adults do think, and there is no thinking to present truth, except as thinking to usurp it (like a whore usurps a grant or scholarship), which requires only recognition of its worth.


We can not find reality as something that can be added to conscious. Conscious is tiny as a defence agaist the onslaught of a reality too profound to deal with as we have been taught and conditioned (insecurity plus security equals security if you ignore the insecurity, as conscious ignores un- and sub-conscious), and not because it is unschooled. So the way is not easy, like reading a best-seller or the scriptures. We must take a tiny flame that lives alongside of the conscious, as other than thinker or its thinking, and fan this dying flame into the light that penetrates all of man’s deceit and folly, because as we accept a shallower and well-meaning man it is accompanied by an equally weak perception of what man destroys and would destroy could he but reach it. Finding an evil among us, and within us as conditioning, is the price for finding the sanctity and astonishing beauty of what's around us. Depth can not be partial. See man only as a surface and we must see nature and the cosmos as equally shallow, and then some preacher, philosopher, therapist or professor can sound deep to us when “adding depth to conscious”, the world’s most trivial pursuit.


The study needs to begin from the first day’s postings. The steps of learning seriously are: Accumulate, and assimilate. You accumulate by action (which in this class means reading and looking), and assimilate by inaction or resting. You know it is time to accumulate more when assimilation is complete, which you will know by a feeling of needing to do it, eagerness to get back to it. You will know when it is time to assimilate by the sense of tiredness. Tiredness is an instinct saying you have accumulated as much as you can assimilate for now, and that you should assimilate while the recent upload is fresh. What we learn here is that anything your glands do, any cocktail of hormones they excrete, are defining your surroundings (which always implies a response: an action or rest), which is instinct. (What a chemistry set! Thank God science hasn’t come up with a way to milk it, or we’d all have tags in our ears.)


To have tiredness working as it should one needs to use as little caffeine and sugar as one can manage on. If you have to use these stimulants, make a time of day after your chores when you don’t use them, and switch to the mildest version you can function on at your chores, for example, green tea and maize-syrup, or if you must, maple syrup or maple sugar. Best, of course, is to go all the way down the yin ladder (Yin-yang is unfortunately the best study of food as it relates to health to date, since medicine is only lucrative as a way to milk 'the illness-cow', not to kill it. Imagine all that expensive education, just to say: "eat and drink cheaper stuff and less of it, and you'll never have to come back". Medicine will always find a costlier way to keep us sick longer. Died at 40, buried at 99.) to bancha roasted twig tea and occasional brown rice syrup or barley malt, but for some a sudden shift is not practical.


You crave yin as a direct consequence of yang, worst case, red meat. Study your fingernails to cheat the doctors: clippings should be as impossible to gnaw through as fishing monofilament, and the lighter areas at the base of the nails indicates a body starved for whatever can be leached from nail, bone, cartilage, and fibro-cartilage. These vanish from pinkie to thumb, one at a time, as you get better. In Sweden Kung Markatta knows who sells the stuff, including Grundboken i makrobiotik av K.M It matters to our learning ability how we feel, and matters to our feelings what our physical growth is rooted in, our roots being inside of us instead of in the ground like a tree’s. Essentially we are plants that pick up our dirt and compost and carry it with us, and like plants we want it free of human tampering.


When we are in charge of a feeling like tiredness (or any other feeling)through the power to apply stimulants, it can not serve in its natural capacity. No serious creature rests deeply only when it is going to sleep. An instinct ('instinct' by common usage, is a bit impersonal, a bit 'lab-procedural', but in our context it is synonymous with perception) will not trick one, so tiredness is not asking us if we feel like resting. In nature you miss this hormonal message (which is not mere tiredness when perceived as the observed or other, which is the self-oblivious and natural perspective, but a world expressing having no further use for us until we have caught on) and die.


When an adult human rests he is still not resting, because he has adopted thought sometime in his teens, and when we have understood thought’s genesis clearly the mind will resume being as it was before this tragic event. This is not only a repair of that problem, but of all the problems in our lives which led to it (hence genesis); the problem, in other words, of conditioned susceptibility. So we are not just removing thought; that by itself is most likely impossible without extensive brain surgery. To remove thought from the memory completely and naturally we must expose all the trifling and tampering our minds have been subjected to since we were born. This means it is easier if one is younger, of course, since a young mind has been subjected to less, but this version of the class, developed through decades of experiments, ought to work with any person who could, if the need arose, return to school.


More Don’ts: If you smoke cannabis I suggest you get rid of the habit and the company while you study (As I sit here I notice one of my neighbours indulging; the habit is spreading. Thank God he doesn‘t smoke tobacco.). It is really the self-prescribed Prozac, and makes it almost pointless to approach a difficult subject.


Tryptamines in minute doses may seem practical for clarifying a difficult problem, but it is doubtful they do anything for the student except shorten the time by intensifying the effort. There are usually ongoing studies somewhere in Europe where a person who wants to try them may volunteer, although in my opinion the doses being used are often excessive. Someone cheating in a chess tournament wouldn’t use nearly as much, and he most certainly would win.

DMT (a street and lab drug taken by smoking or injection) is a natural tryptamine, found in the body, so if you get enough rest you will get a rational dose of it in any case. Seems a bit arrogant to push something around wilfully that comes naturally if your approach is healthy.


Alcohol makes a difficult class utterly impossible. Sad that it’s so popular. There are some nice alcohol free beers now. Norrlands Guld alkoholfri is a bit sweet, but comes in a can.


Finally: It’s amazing how many people have not discovered earplugs. God knows how they expect to study without them. This is not the ‘eat and puke’ education most schools offer to those who have no serious goals but to graduate. This is about the intrinsic right to study in order to achieve a place in society that is a passion, not a job. About freedom!

Av dennis hägglund - 15 juni 2008 03:15

Reading is the art of making meaning from sentences and their context. How do we make meanings? We can do it in a very egocentric way, or we can do it in a way that always arrives at what the author has meant. The egocentric way, the lazy way, is to decide that any meaning must be familiar. This is "reading by recognition”. For example, you read, "Cherishing other as oneself.”, and this becomes, "Sharing. Don’t Bogart that joint. Don't eat your candy in secret where no one can demand a share.”, whereas the original meaning is, "Self-obliviousness, the metamorphosis from self-awareness (which is awareness limited to what can be controlled by will, splitting conscious from unconscious and subconscious) to self-exclusive other-awareness.”.


When we are no longer self-oblivious this real meaning is not recognizable, and the lazy reading of the words does not admit the challenge of the unfamiliar, the yet-to-come. Is there such a thing as self-oblivious people? If so there is no familiar way to mean them, no way to recognize them. Small children are self-oblivious, but no ordinary adult has ever recognized them as such, so despite the familiarity with small children in the present and the fact that all of us have been small children there is no familiarity with the phenomenon.


Self-oblivion may seem to the recognition like some sort of fetish accomplished through bizarre rituals, but in reality it is only the recovery of the lost mind or perception. This recovery is not chosen, not something on a menu to select or not. The intelligence that remains must demand that the intelligence that is lost be recovered if the chance arrives.


It is hard work to read without recognition as the way to arrive at a meaning, and hence as a way to proceed, to continue, to get to the end. It is hard work to see so many words and to have read so few of them after so much effort. But it is education. You don’t pick up your first serious calculus book and read it in an evening.


It is not an insult to us, after we have established that we can earn a living, to be given something that is difficult to get through. The writer didn’t just out of the blue write these things, but has devoted his life to it, so it should not feel strange to the reader that it requires some mental energy and time to understand it and actually get it done.

Av dennis hägglund - 14 juni 2008 13:09

Reads easier if the first comes last in this case.

Av dennis hägglund - 14 juni 2008 11:38

It wasn't easy. I.E is a harsh taskmaster when it comes to pictures, turning beauty into beast. Size limit is 500 pxls either way, making it harder to give satisfaction.

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