THINKING OUTSIDE of the BOX

[Paul S.]

Show me again where you find "faulty accounting" in this little tale?

What I mean by "faulty accounting" is simply the cowboy's statement that, because he holds $1 in his hand, he only paid $9 for the room.

When the $5 comes back, they had all effectively paid $8.33, and by giving the kid $2.00 they each effectively tipped the kid $66c (all this allowing for the fractional penny).

So by his statement that he'd only paid "$9" for the room, the cowboy has not accounted for the tip.

Is that clear enough?

--PS

[Paul S.]

I've been wondering when you would sound off on this... should have know better than to make such a "bet."

Are you so sure that you want to do that? twigsnapper

Apparently not.

Can we arrange some other stakes? I'd like to hear why you think otherwise.

--PS

[Victoria Steele]

The cowboys HAVE accounted for the two dollars that they gave the clerk. They know what they did. Some bull riders have had the sense knocked out of them but they know where their money goes! They realize that the clerk has two dollars. It doesn't stop the rationality that, AFTER he has been paid ... they each then have effectively gotten a dollar back. Simple math here. If I take a dollar and put it back in my pocket after spending ten ..... I figure I have then spent .... nine. Where is the faulty accounting. sheeze even cowboys can count on their fingers. Victoria

[Paul S.]

..before the dimes and pennies.

they each then have effectively gotten a dollar back.

They each of them "effectively" got back 1/3rd of $5 = $1.666. They gave the .666 to the kid in the form of 3x.6666 = $2.00. THEN they had $1.00 LEFT. AFTER they tipped the kid. Not before.

There is a difference between "what they got back" and "what they kept." "What they got back" determines what they paid, not "what they had left."

Any clearer now?

--PS

[Victoria Steele]

We are bogged in semantics. Humor me.

The room should have been twentyfive dollars
Instead thirty was paid. Five dollars was returned. OK so far?

If you take that five dollars and separate it. Two dollars to a clerk
and one dollar each to the original people who put the thirty dollars up in the first place. That means that they have effectively gotten three back and the other two has gone with the clerk. There is the five dollars.

Why is it irrational to take the stand that each one of the cowboys would consider then, after the dust cleared that he had recooped one dollar from the ten that he spent? Why is it so hard to see that he would believe that the room then, in his perception, be a nine dollar draw from his pocket? He started by putting up ten. He gets back one ..... why do we have to go to fractions of a dollar. In that cowboys mind ... he has a whole dollarback

Can we agree on that without going to higher math? Victoria

[Paul S.]

... for those of you on drugs:

That means that they have effectively gotten three back

Stop right there. They "got back" $5/3 = $1.66/ea and THEN chose to pool the $.66/ea in the form of two dollar bills given to the kid.

Why is it irrational to take the stand that each one of the cowboys would consider then, after the dust cleared that he had recooped one dollar from the ten that he spent?

Because that conveniently overlooks the fact that they each tipped the kid 1/3rd of $2.

Why is it so hard to see that he would believe that the room then, in his perception, be a nine dollar draw from his pocket?

Because it's not "perception." It's failed memory. They've forgotten that they pooled a share of their refund to tip the kid.

In that cowboys mind ... he has a whole dollarback

Maybe he's been smoking pot and is suffering short term memory loss.

Can we agree on that without going to higher math?

Higher math, hell, this isn't even "math." It's arithmetic.

The cowboy's conclusion that he "got a dollar back" is just wrong.

--PS

[Victoria Steele]

I agree Paul. You are right. I was wrong. The world is safe. Retreating from the field of battle here. Its your bone. (and if you believe that you don't know me all that well.) Elizabeth and I are going to have tea somewhere ...... safe ....... Victoria

[Paul S.]

Funny how these things take shape and demonstrate unexpected timeliness....

Somewhere in these forums I think I have alluded to a document called "The Structure of Space" that Dr. Brown wrote while at Vega in 1943. I have had that document in front of me for the past, I dunno, three weeks or so, trying to drill into it, trying to understand it, and to digest it so that I can present the essence of it in the next chapter. It's also as much material as I have that really documents what Dr. B was doing during those years in California, and hence is the focus of my attention presently.

Just now I opened one of my notes files to the section on "Structure of Space" and guess what I found? My notes from the original telling of the "Three Salesmen and $30" story that Elizabeth has shared that has sparked this debate.

I was sorta surprised to find it in this particular section, but noting its context, perhaps it's not so surprising.

The occasion was our very first meeting, in Las Vegas in April 2003, and Linda was telling me about her father's doubts about the Michelson Morley experiment, that "most famous failure" in the history of physics that disproved the existence of the "luminiferous aether"

Linda told me her father "...distrusts the results of Michelson Morley as he distrusts math..." and then used the anecdotal riddle Elizabeth shared here to illustrate the source of that "distrust" of math.

And it is that "distrust of math" that enables Dr. Brown, in the opening stanzas of his "Structure of Space," to make this statement regarding the aether:

"The failure of the Michelson Morely experiment to detect a flow of ether does not necessarily indicate the non-existence of the ether, but the results of the theory of relativity may be obtained with or without the ether. For certain phenomenon it is desirable and almost necessary to assume the existence of an ether in order to evolve a satisfactory explanation. An example is the force of gravitation, particularly the electro-gravitational effects; the phenomenon of the movement of a dielectric is such an example."

I am struggling mightily to get past this "Structure of Space" material, to get it into a chapter of some sort, so that it's on the table and I can "get on with it."

In the meantime, there's some REAL "out of the box" thinking for you.

"Chew on that," as Morgan likes to say...

--PS

[Elizabeth Helen Drake]

OK, OK ... taking Victorias lead here. One LAST cowboy joke.

Cowboy out on the range confronting an irate woman hunter. "OK! OK! Lady! .... I agree! I agree! Its your deer! No problem here, honest! Just let me get my saddle off it." <g> Elizabeth

[grinder]

I don't know about anybody else. But the hair is standing up on my arms again. Paul you find a mention of this cowboy thing n paper work that you are studying now and the notes on the cowboys were taken in 2003 ?

and all of a sudden our discussion erupts here on this forum!

Someone once said that this forum is a living breathing thing and I believe it!

This is wild! And funny too! Thanks for your good humor Elizabeth and Victoria. You ladies are formidable! grinder

[Paul S.]

Paul you find a mention of this cowboy thing n paper work that you are studying now and the notes on the cowboys were taken in 2003 ? r

Well, actually the original version from 2003 was about three salesmen, not cowboys. But otherwise, it's the same "equation."

--PS

[kevin.b]

Paul,
I too doubt the findings of the Mickleson morley thingy.
I doubt maths because of what I detect.
what i detect doesnt follow a linear maths path.
It follows a sequence , that is why i have adopted uncle Fibonacci as a hero.
Nothing I detect is reguler , it does have a certain predictability about it, but it certainly doesnt fit into a box.
Boxs have sharp corners at ninty degrees.
Everything i detect in nature has a fluid sensual feature to it.
Everything follows the fibonacci sequence , but not to any known maths division.
I deduce this is where metric measure may have origonated , to give a finer method of following something that that defies normal division.
If therefore you are using normal maths to formulate anything to manipulate this force, you may come close , but never actually follow it, and so will break down, quite litterally, you will be fighting nature , instead of adhering to its formulae.
I am going to create my own measure, these i will call finchs.
Nearly inchs , but not quite, and in respect for uncle fibonacci, they will be prefixed with the letter F
Everything I detect follows a sequence , not a reguler multiplier.
All the drawings and patterns I see , that are supposedly to reflect nature tend to be reguler divisions of 360 degrees.
I do not detect this, i detect everything following fibonacci.
Then all the spirals that descend inwards are perfect, all the spirals that ascend outward are perfect.
Perfect to nature.
Unless you adhere to, and copy this, you will face destruction.
The force of nature takes no pity on anything that doesn't conform.
If we built to and aligned to, with all reference to natures ways, then our construction would be at one with all, and would still be there in milleniums to come, if not it will dissolve back into the aether flows.
Kevin

[Trickfox]

Ok Mr. Twigsnapper.

I'll bet you were waiting for some of us to finally understand the PARADOX.
The way I see it. We have stumbled directly into IT.

Perhaps the 3 rooms for 25 dollar argument IS THE BEST WAY TO EXPLAIN the strange math problem that Dr. Brown and Beau Kitselmen probably ran into during their work together. I'll know for sure when I finally get a hold of "the vega curve calculator".

You once told me that the most difficult thing about science is how to explain very complex math in the simplest terms. I now understand what you meant.

Sometimes, there is no possible explanation. One MUST TRY AND SOLVE THE EQUATION. After hitting our heads over and over on the wall we finally begin to understand.

The strange thing here is that because of all this hullaballoo I've made a rather important discovery about Mathematical Cardinality.

It is a point I made on my own website several years ago, http://www.psychopropulseur.com/truth.html and until now I have considered it to be simply a curious phenomena, and I took it only as a mildly curious quirk. Now I'm beginning to see just exactly how important it really is.

Victoria's point: The "if we decide" is more important than the "if only".

A simple twist in words and the meaning takes on a whole new importance.

I suppose I went over this in my mind a long time ago.
So let me now quote a few lines from my own webpage.

Let's play with two important english words: Truth and Reality.
Let's put the word "NOT" in this combination: TRUTH/NOT/REAL.
Then reverse the order REALITY/NOT/TRUE.

Can any of these statements be truth, or false, or both..
This combination of "logic statements" is known by Scientists and Mathematicians as the "strange loop" syndrome.

It turns out that one or both of these statements has a "real world" application. In other words, A simple twist of words and suddenly every meaningful value that a person cherishes about life can change so dramatically.

Gödel was the first to develop a theory to try to resolve the fundamental arguments.
Lorentz, Planck and Minkowski were other scientists who tackled the truth/reality problem. They did so by trying to mathematically defining the measurement of EVERYTHING.

The key issue is "Cardinality". It follows that whichever word a person first decides to use ultimately decides what is what regarding Truth and Reality.

It seems that Einstein's theory of relativity is one of the possible "real world" applications to the truth/reality strange loop.

According to Einstein what is real depends on your point of view.:

This is your truth but it's not the same truth for someone else who is not exactly WHERE you are and WHEN you are there.

*****end of webpage quote******

Could it simply be that Dr. Brown and Beau Kitselman were discovering "the equivalent of a Lorentz Transformation" in Electro-hydrodynamics, or possibly electrogravitics?

What do you think?
Did we fall directly into some sort of Paradox?

Trickfox.

[Elizabeth Helen Drake]

Headfirst Trickfox. Thankyou for the answer. Elizabeth

[Trickfox]

Thank you Elizabeth

OK......That means that Russell and Whitehead probably had the exact same problem in their work on the Prolegomena to Cardinal Arithmetic, and if I tear appart their long first order logic theorem, I should be able to find the exact same failure in their logic. If the two of them HAD to agree to co-publish the work, how could they possibly BOTH agree unless one of the integers was the imaginary of the other. This would constitute a good argument for my contention that 1+i=2 Now, this puts a whole new impetus for the Clifford spacial theorem as I understand it.

Sorry everyone...... Here I am doing that complex math thing again.......

OK... look.....This last post was for ANY mathematician who wants to know where I'm heading....EVERYONE ELSE, just please ignore me!!!!

I don't keep well organised notes I just write on everything and in the margin of books, and on napkins (which I end up typing in later in my computer) sometimes I write stuff in this forum like a reminder to myself.
So please bear with me here.

I can only hope that some Mathematician who reads this will answer me. Agree, or disagree, but PLEASE if you understad this, don't ignore me.

It sure would be nice to get the opinion of another person who reads this stuff because sometimes the trickfox gets very lonely and isolated in this little sandbox playground.

After all, I can't possibly be the only person in the world to have read the Principia Mathematica by Russell and Whitehead.

Trickfox

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