Trial and Error

A  text only post, and about history, afield from fauna and flora, sort of...and grim, so dear readers, a caution to read on...

I can't remember just what all I was thinking on when I rolled my billiard ball set, fifteen balls and a cue ball, out on the carpet, and found by putting one in the center surrounded by others, I could make polygons...looking back, I think I had that wonderful book of snowflake photographs in mind...

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It took Bentley two years of painstaking  trial and error, but at the age of eighteen years, he made the world's first photomicrograph of a snow crystal (January 15, 1815)

Masters of Photography - Wilson 'Snowflake' Bentley

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZylqAjK1ryU



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptLmA263hlk

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I had in mind I think that the snowflakes' shape came from the atoms themselves, and how they were combining, and insomuch as atoms are thought of as little spheres, the billiard balls could represent them...and that worked just fine...I could make hexagons easy...I turned to using pennies, and one can make more polygons...atoms join together at angles, famously Mickey Mouse ears represent the  water molecule, with two hydrogen atoms joined to an oxygen atom...

for myself, I was making a discovery which of course had already been much discovered!...and messing with the billiard balls and pennies, I felt a bit like Richard Dreyfuss when he was messing with the potatoes at the dinner table in the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind...he thinks he's losing his mind...his family knows he is...what's happened is the approaching aliens have implanted an image of where they are going to arrive at in a lot of people's imaginations...Dreyfuss being just one...he's trying to articulate Devil's Tower with the potatoes...apparently, the scientific community has gotten the clearest messages, as they know just where to go, and what to bring, at Devil's Tower in Montana...but  some in the general public were seeing a vague image of the Tower, and a few, make it to there...Dreyfuss makes it into the spaceship!...it's a fun story, and one way the aliens message is with five tones, da de da daaa daaaaa...Spielberg, the producer, may be playing with the sound the five vowels make, 
a e I o u ...lol...my keyboard wants to print capital I when I put those letters together...a e I o u...that movie was out at the time, and was 'on my mind' too!

I hadn't thought to write about snowflakes starting out this post...had more in mind to write about the trial and error experiments Thomas Edison used to invent light bulbs, and compare that story with how Nikola Tesla invented a/c, alternating current, electricity...that's a famous story of a rivalry between Tesla and Edison...but I diverted a bit to snowflakes, and read a lot again about Tesla this morning...and find this!

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I have observed electrical actions, which have appeared inexplicable. Faint and uncertain though they were, they have given me a deep conviction and foreknowledge, that ere long all human beings on this globe, as one, will turn their eyes to the firmament above, with feelings of love and reverence, thrilled by the glad news: "Brethren! We have a message from another world, unknown and remote. It reads: one… two… three…"

Christmas 1900

Nikola Tesla

... ... ...

In the summer of 1899, while alone in his Colorado Springs laboratory working with his magnifying transmitter, the inimitable Nikola Tesla observed a series of unusual rhythmic signals which he described as "counting codes."

Letters of Note
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2009/12/we-have-message-from-another-world.html

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I happened on that letter trying find web copies of letters between Nikola Tesla and Katherine Johnson...

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Katharine McMahon Johnson was, according to some accounts, the only woman Tesla ever loved. She was the wife of Tesla's lifelong friend, Robert Underwood Johnson. Though the two often exchanged flirtatious letters, their relationship was totally platonic. Not forgetting Tesla even at death, she charged Robert to keep in close touch with him always.

http://www.teslauniverse.com/nikola-tesla/timeline/1925-teslas-close-friend-katharine-johnson-dies

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...another eternal triangle!

Tesla could just 'see' an invention, his 'mind's eye' was acute, and where Edison could invent through trial and error, and by making small steps beyond things already invented, Tesla could leap ahead and with one fell swoop make the a/c generators at Niagara Falls that lit up New York...it was all done in his head...Michelangelo could do this too...he could look at a block of marble, and see the sculpture in it...many comic book artists do this...they see a scene in their minds eye, and the rest is just a matter of tracing it out on paper...I wish I had such skill!...I'm more of the Edison school...I'll have a lot of sketches and ideas gathered, make some trial and error preliminaries, and come up with something...I can see with my mind's eye imaginative things, but cant quite get them to hold still long enough to trace them out...in this regard, I'm average, I imagine!

I never thought of it as such, but the mind's eye can be considered another sense, just like hearing, and taste, and touch, and sight, and such...and a study just came out that finds some people don't have a mind's eye...Tesla had an exceptional mind's eye...I consider my own average...there's  probably a range to this, like acuity in eyesight...

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The hypothesized condition where a person lacks a mind's eye is called aphantasia. The term was first suggested in a 2015 study

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind%27s_eye

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Here's an article about the study, which I had found just recently in one of my morning news reviews!

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Close your eyes and imagine walking along a sandy beach and then gazing over the horizon as the Sun rises. How clear is the image that springs to mind?

Most people can readily conjure images inside their head - known as their mind's eye.
But this year scientists have described a condition, aphantasia, in which some people are unable to visualise mental images.

Aphantasia: A life without mental images

By James Gallagher Health editor, BBC News website

 

http://www.bbc.com/news/health-34039054

 

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There are I think, all kinds of senses like this...a music sense, a mathematical sense, a religious sense, a scientific sense, with all kinds of shades, differences, gradations...

 

A Sense of Justice

 

There was once a town in old Greece where the citizens had no sense at all when it came to settling disputes...they would quarrel and fight over things incessantly...one day, a dispute between two quarrelers came to the attention of a third neutral person, and they suggested a solution, a solution that made some sense, so the quarrelers tried it, and it worked!...they told their friends about this, and the person with solutions was soon in demand, and the back and forths quieted down...they made the person with the solutions King!

 

That's a recollection of a story in the history of Old Greece by Herodotus...the history of law and order isn't that simple...

 

Draco, a King in ancient Greece, lay down a set of laws that were so harsh, that one could expect to be executed for stealing a cabbage...Greece wanted law and order, so for awhile Draco's laws were the laws of the land, but eventually citizens got together and watered them down a bit...'Draconian' is now an adjective for harsh laws...

 

 

 

A sense of justice isn't just about Truth and what's Right, so much as it is also about what is practical...experience, trial and error, provide the knowledge of what is practical!...a gloomy consideration, as it suggests Law and Order is like a game board, or playing field...rules have been made and changed over time just to make the game fair, and have no counterpart to say, the law of gravity...and it's simple sense of justice that can see if the rules aren't fair, if there is unfairness, the fans in the stands will riot!

 

 

I have it that laws are arrived at through trial and error...literally...if at a trial an error is made, it's awful...an innocent can be punished...or too harshly punished...which brings on a back-and- forth, snarling and biting and scratching!...so laws have come down that punish, and order, but are short of being Draconian...famously, the Bible says an eye for an eye a tooth for a tooth...but the lawmakers of Israel arrived at intricate compromises, where maybe a few sheep and goats could compensate for a 'tooth' or an 'eye'...what the ancients realized, was punished people have relatives, family, friends, and such, and if the punishment was too harsh, or worse, arrived at by error, or even worse, arrived at by outright lies at a trial, feuds would erupt...so, through trial and error, I'd say, has come the scales of justice, which balance according to keeping the peace sometimes, as much as rightness or wrongness...

 

An example:...In the news, low income people haven't been able to pay fines for minor violations...traffic tickets, divorce settlements, and such...and towns, strapped for cash, are strong arming these people by threatening them with being put in jail...and they have been putting them in jail...and it all amounts to the return of Debtors Prisons...here's link to one such story:

 

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Thompson notes that the court later took up a JCS officer's recommendation to incarcerate him, resulting in a five-day stint in jail for failing to pay the fine.
Thompson, whose case was represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, is just one of the poor Americans ending up in a modern-day version of the debtors' prison, an antiquated punishment that was eliminated by the U.S. in the 1830s.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-rise-of-americas-debtor-prisons/

 

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This  is one of the problems that the dustups in Ferguson, Missouri uncovered...police were farming low income citizens to fill city coffers!   In these stories, that adjective, 'Draconian', shows up...a lot!

 

These dustup news stories often have comments, and the comments are pretty much the same that beset that Greek town long ago...or yesterday, as it seems Greece's indebtedness to the EU has landed it in a debtors prison bounded by its own borders...and there's a heck of a back-and-forth brewing...much scratching and biting and clawing to come, I'd say!

 

John Muir met Nikola Tesla...they were both friends with Robert Underwood Johnson, editor of the magazine 'Century'...Johnson tried to help Muir with the opposition to Hetch Hetchy damn...but that's another story of injustice...no industries are to be built or pursued in National Parks, but San Francisco wanted water after the earthquake...Muir met a lot of people through Johnson, and a lot of people met Muir!

 

Oh...my mind's eye saw Muir leaning down to look at the surface of Lake Tenaya, where  he saw Tyndall Ice Flowers...(Edge of Lake Tenaya post) I wanted then to find a good pic of such, and here now in another search, I find:

 

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 According to Bentley, there are several forms of ice with the name ‘ice flowers’. In his book he describes two such flower-like forms⁵. One type is now called “Tyndall flowers”, named after the Irish physicist-naturalist John Tyndall who first described them. These flowers, pictured below, form when light from the sun, or a bright lamp in a laboratory, is absorbed in the ice, thus melting a little bit of ice within a larger slab of ice. 

 

http://snowflakebentley.com/WBnews3.htm

 

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oh!...another sense for the list...a sense of serendipity...:)

 

 

DavidDavid

 

 

 

 

 

 
 




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