The incorporation of Time
… [read full article]Posts tagged with 'inspiration'
Ok I think I’m getting it: Environments naturally prefer steady-state processes over transient processes because steady-state processes disturb the environment the least. The environment can “form a crust around it” as it were, allowing the steady state process to just do its thing as it does. This to me explains the tolerances in steady-state systems: usually perturbing a steady-state process doesn’t result in its collapse because the structure of the steady state mechanism in cooperation with the environment can nudge the steady state process back to where it should be. Environment averages the differences as it were. The metronomes on the skateboard on top of the cans situation.
Ok I think I’m
… [read full article]That’s the stuff I did in Excel at the pharmaceutical company. That one project – MY god the data was a mess. CD ROMs, stuff off IBM mainframes, stuff in emails, surveys from who knows where…. oh and website data too. Pulling it all together in a way that was “pushbutton” was where I ended up where it gathered all the data in whatever state it was at. That’s where some of the VBA came in really handy, cleaning up the files prior to bringing them into the ginormous spreadsheet that did everything. 2000+ distinct reports which were applications of their own, auto emailed to 8000 sales reps (4 sales reps per territory as they used a district/territory model). which gave them a UI where they could create their own graphs and charts as needed … on a weekly basis. All using Excel and VBA [I made a “configuration screen” for that stuff). It was for Claritin / Zytec / Allegra comparison at first, and then for others, and it drilled down to the Doctor / insurance company /drug most commonly prescribed / patient level. Felt wrong even having all this information tbh. But with it they each knew what the doctor was prescribing and which insurance companies would pay for Claritin and which ones would not. That was one big major project among others. It generated the company $$$, which I’d occasionally hear “how much per district” and it felt good to help. They hired a $2 million team from Microstrategy to replace what I did which is a whole story in itself as it was sneaky, and it failed ultimately. But when I left, I trained 3 people on it, I moved to Florida and they were still modifying it for new drugs and theywere STILL using it 8 years later in 2010. As Schering merged with Merck somewhere along the line I have no idea if it’s still running in 2020. I sure hope not. That’s a horrifying thought. More horrifying is that I knew in the early 2000s just how much pharmaceutical companies were ripping off which countries. I had so many non-disclosure agreements to sign when I worked on that stuff.
That’s the stuff I
… [read full article]Thank you! Yes, it is a quest for authenticity, not a quest for universals. I believe that I cannot rightfully prescribe advice on “how the world should be” prior to knowing “how myself is”. I would not advice programmers today to use GOTO – they have been dead for decades now in the current day community-programming pools. The paradigm shifted LONG ago away from the LONE PROGRAMMER on a MISSION. Nevertheless, I still strive to understand myself and with that perhaps gain insight into others. From there, maybe I’ll be at a point to say “this is how the world is and how it should be instead” but right now, public introspection is most of wha
Thank you! Yes, it
… [read full article]Ooh, this should be good. I like converting things from one type to another: images to sound, waves to midi files, movies to flow fields, etc, and these involve moving windows and precisely this kind of thing. A mathematical theory of resources Many fields of science investigate states and processes as resources. Chemistry, thermodynamics, Shannon’s theory of communication channels, and the theory of quantum entanglement are prominent examples. Questions addressed by these theories include: Which resources can be converted into which others? At what rate can many copies of one resource be converted into many copies of another? Can a catalyst enable a conversion? How to quantify a resource? We propose a general mathematical definition of resource theory. We prove general theorems about how resource theories can be constructed from theories of processes with a subclass of processes that are freely implementable. These define the means by which costly states and processes can be interconverted. We outline how various existing resource theories fit into our framework, which is a first step in a project of identifying universal features and principles of resource theories. We develop a few general results concerning resource convertibility.
Ooh, this should be
… [read full article]“What keeps things stable on earth?” I ask Google. Got good answers back. First was gravity. Holds the atmosphere and water right here pretty much. In that stability, there’s the cycle we got. —– The cycle begins with volcanoes spewing CO2 into the atmosphere, which helps keep the planet warm, thanks to the greenhouse effect. This warmth allows seawater to evaporate, forming clouds and rain. As the rain contains dissolved CO2 it is slightly acidic and so it reacts with surface rocks to dissolve carbon-containing minerals into the water. This mixture is then washed out to sea, where the minerals build up and eventually precipitate out to form new carbon-containing rocks on the seabed. Sooner or later, plate tectonics carries these rocks into a subduction zone, where CO2 is baked out of them by heat of the Earth’s interior and later returns to the atmosphere via volcanoes. This cycle turns out to be an extremely effective thermostat. When the planet is warm, rainfall increases, speeding the rate of atmospheric CO2 removal and cooling the planet. When it is cold, rainfall decreases, allowing volcanic gases to build up in the atmosphere, warming the planet. Venus and Mars probably had similar thermostats early on. Venus, though,
“What keeps things
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