finding what works

If you are serious about any particular problem, ranging from how to fix a dripping faucet or a broken electrical circuit to making gerrymanders constructive, minimizing abortions, or reducing gun deaths, consider adapting a scout (instead of soldier) mindset and explore options based on a cycle of observe => model => apply => predict => implement => observe.... 

This cycle of variation to selection and back is not only how for example science works (although it too often gets bogged down in doctrine), but also how life on earth has always worked. In other words, it is part of perhaps our oldest constitution, namely that on which life itself continues to adapt and survive.

redirecting reproduction

Historically population growth was a robust community goal, while genetic (replicable molecule code) reproduction was a robust individual goal. Hence incentives to marry & multiply were naturally selected.

There are now new opportunities for memetic (replicable idea code) expression, while the challenges of supporting even existing (let alone added) population are growing e.g. with soil depletion, global warming, etc. Therefore community-level health (e.g. measured by task-layer multiplicity) may be better served by redirecting evolved behaviors from their molecule-code focus toward an idea-code focus instead. N'est-ce pas?

pandemic year 2

If only folks could get that masks are the antidote and not the cause for shutdowns. Moreover, of course, that our collective opponent is a virus and not a subculture.

honorable traditions

 In the language of the wild west, and in the spirit of those ancient highway "Burma-Shave" signs:

• It's bad manners to bring
• a knife to a slugfest, or
• a pistol to a blade brawl.
• Thus healthy traditions die
• when guns are held by all.

binarize less unify more

 In the world of big ideas (not math or binary logic) the opposite of stupid is also stupid. Binarizng descriptions of social events (does/doesn't cause illness as opposed to a probability, cartoonification with party rather than individual identifications) can mitigate electronic media's tendency to polarize.

model selection math

This is an area of key integrative importance in this age of electronic ideastreams.

technical definition

Proper acceleration is the physical acceleration experienced by an object relative to a locally co-moving free-float frame. This may be quite different than the coordinate-acceleration seen in a separate reference frame (inertial or not) of co-moving yardsticks and synchronized clocks.

The proper-acceleration 3-vector, combined with a null time-component, yields the object's four-acceleration (as measured by the object itself) which makes proper-acceleration's magnitude Lorentz-invariant. Thus proper-acceleration comes in handy: (i) with accelerated coordinate systems, (ii) at relativistic speeds, and (iii) in curved spacetime.

Proper-acceleration reduces to coordinate-acceleration in an inertial coordinate system in flat spacetime (i.e. in the absence of gravity), provided the magnitude of the object's proper-velocity (momentum per unit mass) is much less than the speed of light c. Here we focus on situations where proper-acceleration and coordinate-acceleration are not always the same.