(De-)Constructing Monatary Fantasie

See also: Zero Hedge: In A Paper System, All Assets Are Backed by the Treasury Bond

x = “popper open society plato hexagon octagon circle”

ƒ(x) = google(x)

1. Plato's approximation of pi? « Division by Zero

   divisbyzero.com/2012/06/20/platos-approximation-of-pi/

   2 days ago – Here's what Popper has to say (this is in his notes to Chapter 6 of The Open Society and its Enemies, Vol. 1, pp. ... of this curious fact is that it follows from the fact that the arithmetical mean of the areas of the circumscribed hexagon and the inscribed octagon is a good approximation of the area of the circle.

2. The Open Society and Its Enemies: The spell of Plato - Google Books Result

   books.google.com/books?isbn=0691019681...Karl Raimund Popper, Sir Karl Raimund Popper - 1971 - Medical - 368 pages
   Karl Raimund Popper, Sir Karl Raimund Popper ... triangles r(VI+V3) The rectangle ABCD has an area exceeding that of the circle by less than 1 J ... of the areas of the circumscribed hexagon and the inscribed octagon is a good approximation ...

3. Division by Zero

   divisbyzero.com/

   2 days ago – Here's what Popper has to say (this is in his notes to Chapter 6 of The Open Society and its Enemies, Vol. 1, pp. ... of this curious fact is that it follows from the fact that the arithmetical mean of the areas of the circumscribed hexagon and the inscribed octagon is a good approximation of the area of the circle.

4. Pleiade | About us | A postscript... Logos and other trivia

5. Numbers - Google Books Result

6. Root 2, Root 3, Plato, Archimedes, and Pi - Math Forum Discussions

7. ¡ℜ» Plato's “House”

   losersreview.blogspot.com/2012/04/platos.html

   Apr 13, 2012 – “The rectangle ABCD has an area exceeding that of the circle by less than 1½ pro mille” ... mean of the areas of the circumscribed hexagon and the inscribed octagon is a ... Karl Popper - The Open Society and Its Enemies ...

Niektóre Lampka do Czytania

Tłumaczenie?

New York Public Library Links 1848, Year of Revolution Rapport, Michael (2009) The Bodhran Makers Keane, John B. (1992) The Collapse of Complex Societies Tainter, Joseph A. (1988) In the Shadow of War Sherry, Michael S. (1995) Heart of Darkness Conrad, Joseph (2009) The New American Militarism Bacevich, Andrew J. (2006) Blues for Mister Charlie Baldwin, James (1995)

Google Book Links (mostly)   THIS book is amazing — read the first 50 pages at google books and have plowed through over half of its 400+ pages in just a few days ... while reading Walter Lippman online (in a couple of places actually) and In The Shadow of War (shown below). I picked up The Bodhran Makers on a tip from Charles Pierce's blog at Esquire. It's an Irish tale about a reactionary priest and his run-in with some Celtic party-hounds. (The bodhran is a traditional Irish drum.) Sounds like fun. A couple of years back Pierce brought us Idiot America, an entertaining and impressively researched look at our civil society's depressingly advanced state of disintegration ... what's left of it anyway. He tipped me off to R.L. Ketcham's 700+ page brick of a biography on James "Constitution-Mack-Daddy" Madison. Illuminations through deep time. Jim Rickards and his bestselling Currency Wars gave me the tip on The Collapse of Complex Societies. They only have one copy at the library and I'm currently 13th in line. I was 25th a week or so ago so ... it'll be a while before "we" get to dig into that one. Never did read Heart of Darkness, but since The Secret Agent was such a thoroughly "simple" and forward-looking tome I've decided to catch up on Mr. "Korzeniowski's" adopted tongue. Andrew Bacevich's work is the most honest and balanced appraisal of US Foreign Policy available today. He tipped me off to In The Shadow of War. & James Baldwin is still the greatest 21C American writer, from the grave ... bitchez. What are you reading?

How “Meta” Are You

95* “shades” worth

Some time before during or after “flying” around atypical, two dimensional hyperspace I resolved to invest time into fully exploring Photoshop Elements' (pse9) filters and get a handle on its nearly overwhelming array of effects.

In the same spirit as Halftone Drilldown, this inquiry works toward a fuller understanding of the nuances and applicability of what's available. My own bit of “content aware”ness—I guess.

Initially there are two distinct approaches to the effort. The first is depicted by the “pse9 filter menus” chart at the left which begins a process of organizing the effect groups based on where they are within the GUI and more loosely upon their related functions. Additional design constraints included a desire for density without crowding and reading ease. It's not nearly as complicated as London or NYC subway maps ... at least until I add the subsequent effect's dialog boxes.

“Well. How Did [We] Get Here?”

“... this is not my beautiful house ...”

a b

Plato's “House”

“The rectangle ABCD has an area exceeding that of the circle by less than 1½ pro mille”

It is a curious fact that √2 + √3 very nearly approximates π. (Cp. E. Borel, Space and Time, 1926, 1960, p. 216 ... ) The excess is less than 0.0047, i.e. less than 1½ pro mille of π, and a better approximation to π was hardly known at the time.

Halftone Drilldown

Virtually “Wet Textiles” & Seeking Moiré

	Not all digital artifacts are bad. Some, like the ones you see here, may even be desired. Experience is the best guide I know, and the practical application of theory demands trials and (one hopes) error correction, therefore the images in this post are part of an investigation into the Moiré patterns produced with chosen sets of channel degrees employed by Photoshop Elements' “Color Halftone” filter found at the top of its “Pixilate” menu (i.e.: Filter→Pixilate→Color Halftone). The top right monochrome thumbnail was used to produce all the “test” images here. The table below aligns columns with particular sets of degrees of rotation in each color channel with rows containing increasing radii (in pixels) for each set. The first column's set of rotations are at 45 degree increments which generates a square grid Moiré. These angular values were also used to create the two larger images above the table: image top-left was produced using a radius of 7 pixels, the one to the right was metered to 20 pixels. Both are full size, whereas the images below have been scaled down to fit this layout.
		Color Halftone Channel Rotation
r↓		045   090     135       180	030   060     120       150	095   100     105       110	072   144     216       288	000   072     216       288	091   034     254       009	Ch. 1 2  3    4
	4

“All clocks are clouds”

In other words, I am an indeterminist—like Peirce, Compton, and most other contemporary physicists; and I believe, with most of them, that Einstein was mistaken in trying to hold fast to determinism. (l may perhaps say that I discussed this matter with him, and that I did not find him adamant.) But I also believe that those modern physicists were badly mistaken who pooh-poohed as antediluvian Einstein’s criticism of the quantum theory. Nobody can fail to admire the quantum theory, and Einstein did so wholeheartedly; but his criticism of the fashionable interpretation of the theory—the Copenhagen interpretation—like the criticisms offered by de Broglie, Schrodinger, Bohm, Vigier, and more recently by Landé, have been too lightly brushed aside by most physicists.¹⁷ There are fashions in science, and some scientists climb on the band wagon almost as readily as do some painters and musicians. But although fashions and bandwagons may attract the weak, they should be resisted rather than encouraged;¹⁸ and criticism like Einstein’s is always valuable: one can always learn something from it.

---

¹⁷ See also [Popper's] book The Logic of Scientific Discovery, especially the new Appendix *xi; also chapter ix of this book which contains criticism that is valid in the main, though, in view of Einstein’s criticism in Appendix *xii, I had to withdraw the thought experiment (of 1934) described in section 77. This experiment can be replaced, however, by the famous thought experiment of Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen, discussed there in Appendix *xi and *xii. See also my paper ‘The Propensity Interpretation of the Calculus of Probability, and the Quantum Theory’, in Observation and Interpretation, ed. by S. Korner, 1957, pp. 65-70, and 83-9.

¹⁸ The last sentence is meant as a criticism of some of the views contained in Thomas S. Kuhn’s interesting and stimulating book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1963.

pp. 216-217

Karl Popper, “Of Clouds and Clocks”
Arthur Compton Memorial Lecture, Washington University, 1965

CYMK HTML Palette

Takes a moment to load because it's a little under 78 Kb of pure style-pounding HTML code generated from Excel spreadsheets built for this express purpose.

As much as I enjoy Photoshop/E9, working with the color dialog is an unsatisfying hassle due to its narrow confines.

Advantages of this HTML palette over an image or what's available in PSE (and Windows) for choosing colors are the greatly expanded range at a glance, and the utility of double clicking on the desired six-digit hex codes for a quick cut and paste into the Photoshop dialog box.

Table-icious (For Two)

Table-icious

Oil FF HOUST Personal-ie Unemployed ...

... GDP Fed DEBT CPI CMDEBT & A Little Bit Of Gold

Three time frames for one collection of data.

You can work with the charts at the FrED with these links: 1946 1985 2004

	Series		Oil Gold FF HS U/E Personal-ie gdp Fdebt cpi cmdebt	(Scale) Size ‡		Period	ƒ(x)
1	OILPRICE		Spot Oil Price: West Texas Intermediate	2	Solid	M	% Chg fYA
2	GVZCLS		CBOE Gold ETF Volatility Index	2	Solid	Bi-W (m)	% Chg fYA
3	FF		Effective Federal Funds Rate	1	Solid	W (w)	%
4	HOUST		New Privately Owned Housing Units Started	1	Solid	M	% Chg fYA
5	UNEMPLOY		Unemployed	1	Solid	M	% Chg fYA
6	DPIC96		Real Disposable Personal Income	2	Solid	Q	% Chg fYA
7	PCEC96		Real Personal Consumption Expenditures	2	Solid	M	% Chg fYA
8	GFDEBTN		Federal Government Debt: Total Public Debt	1	Dotted	Q(eop)	% Chg fYA
9	CPIAUCSL		Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers: All Items	2	Solid	M	% Chg fYA
10	CMDEBT		Household Credit Market Debt Outstanding	1	Dashed	Q(eop)	% Chg fYA
11	GDP		Gross Domestic Product, 1 Decimal	2	Solid	Q	% Chg fYA

^‡ Line sizes listed for 1946 chart. Line and marker weights increase through charts for 1985 and 2004.

Monetary Adventures

“You LOT! – (£ ¥ € $ ?) – Don't stop. Give it all you got.”

Makes The World Go Round

Only a moderate amount of transformation here. A simple “register” shift to four of the six currency pairs in this chart helps extricate them from the other busy squiggles.  Four of the data sets are making repeat appearances and will likely serve as a thematic backdrop for future work in varying degrees. They are: Spot Oil Price, Effective (ha! – that's rich) Federal Funds Rate, Gross Domestic Product and the Unemployment rate ... as measured by the Fed anyway.

There's a lot of noise in the Fed's data, and not just from the measurements. The Bureau Of Labor Statistics and The Federal Reserve have been working together for more than twenty years to over-analyze and under-report the inflation that anyone with a checkbook and a pulse confronts when dropping gelt. Seriously, they don't “shop” like the rest of us.

Data, Thou Art

the FrED chart

Bleedin' Nos.

These images, created at The St. Louis Federal Reserve's FRED, exist somewhere between data and art.



I'll be able to massage these lines into more numerically informative relationships once I start playing with the transformation capability that's been intelligently provided, but for now simple percentage differences from a year ago (fYA) will do.

	Series		GDP OIL Energ/Food/CPI Unemployed Cap.Util. Housing Starts	(Scale) Size		Period	ƒ(x)
1	GDP		Gross Domestic Product, 1 Decimal	2	Solid	Q	% Chg fYA
2	HOUST		Housing Starts: Total: New Privately Owned Housing Units Started	1	Solid	M	% Chg fYA
3	FF		Effective Federal Funds Rate	2	Solid	W (w)	%
4	MCUMFN		Cap Utilization: Manufacturing (NAICS)	2	Dashed	M	% of Cap
5	CPIUFDSL		Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers: Food	2	Solid	M	% Chg fYA
6	CPIAUCSL		Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers: All Items	2	Solid	M	% Chg fYA
7	UNEMPLOY		Unemployed	1	Solid	M	% Chg fYA
8	OILPRICE		Spot Oil Price: West Texas Intermediate	1	Solid	M	$/brl
9	CPIENGSL		Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers: Energy	2	Solid	M	% Chg fYA

So I Worked On It...

..a little bit

02 Monetary Consumption LR @ St. Louis Fed

I've added defense spending to the original chart image from yesterday's post. Click the image to open a new window with a full sized view. The title in the caption is linked to this graph's page at Fred where you can play around with the data and formatting.

The "better legend" below has a variety of informational links under Series, and direct links to a chart of each individual series at The St. Louis Federal Reserve website under the charts name.

Having spent most of the day on putting all this together, it's time to watch "The Big Clock" for Friday Noir.

I'd Rather Be Working With These

Instead of jerking around with that POS Internet Explorer

FredGraph @ St. Louis Federal Reserve

For all you IE users out there:


get. a. fricken. clue.


I've just spent the last 36+ hours beating my now concave forebrain into the interminable intricacies and flighty nuances of conditional CSS statements in a vain attempt to make these pages not look like the tawdry bollocks that Internet Explorer turns them into.

These guys are way more interesting. N'est-ce pas? (Click each image for full size.)
It's an awful lot of data crammed into a small window, and all three charts run the same series of numbers over increasing time frames, so the information in the larger one above is also found at the right end of these two here. I'll have more to say about them ... eventually.

These images graphically represent how my brain feels trying to get blogger's widget festooned template to "scan" properly in Internet Explorer. Even though the majority of users over this past month nave been hip enough to eschew Microsoft's chronically lame and technologically invidious browser, the last few weeks have seen a rather disturbing increase in IE viewership. Seriously, what the fuck good are standards if everybody has their own. Anyone? Bueller...?