Taomeow

Why would I ask a question about the multiplication table?.. I wanted to see what meaning you assign to the operation you proposed. Meaning. Here's how the I Ching is really generated. It reflects the actual process of the separation of wuji into yin and yang and the emergence of the trigrams and hexagrams. The linear sequence has been created because in a book you go line by line rather than in a circle, is all. Confucius is reported to have been asked, at the end of his very long and fruitful life, if he has any regrets. "Just one... I wish I had fifty more years of life to dedicate exclusively to the study of the I Ching," he responded.

That's because Leibniz who introduced binary mathematics to the West and became de facto the father of the computer binary system was familiarized with the I Ching by a Jesuit missionary in China, a personal friend of his, who translated it and sent it to him. Leibniz was very impressed and put the idea to good use. Too bad we never see credit given where credit is due in such cases. Leibniz is credited with inventing it instead...

And why would you multiply 8 trigrams by 8 trigrams? What's the idea behind the arithmetic?

Very briefly, this is part of the taoist take on the nature of reality, the "as above so below" principle coded in the binary above-below numerical system of the I Ching. "Heaven above, 32, Earth below, 32" is a statement often encountered in taoist alchemical literature. The set of 64 hexagrams exhibits a perfect balance: 32 hexagrams are Yang in nature. These are the hexagrams that contain an odd number of solid, yang lines (1, 3, or 5). 32 hexagrams are Yin in nature. These are the hexagrams that contain an even number of broken, yin lines (2, 4, or 6). The human body, measured in kuns, is 64. A kun is a measurement unit (used, e.g., by competent acupuncturists for locating points) for a particular individual, approximately the width of that individual's thumb. It is of course slightly different for all people, but based on the fractal nature of the body, there will be corresponding differences in the length of every part, and each anatomically normal human body will measure 64 kun. The lower "heaven" part and the upper "earth" part are each 32.

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You should also have mentioned what happened next.

You did well with those stars -- first noticing them, then noticing the surrounding circumstances and arriving at correct rather than erroneous conclusions. Part of the pattern recognition skill is to be able to first notice and then dismiss false or illusory patterns, the ones that appear to convince our senses they are there and fool our minds into believing in their existence -- or vice versa, convince our minds and fool our senses. In psychology, this fallacy of discerning a pattern that isn't there is known as apophenia, interpreting meaningless noise as meaningful. Sometimes it is an early symptom of schizophrenia -- including society-wide mass psychoses induced by being continuously fed false/fake patterns by the media, the educational system, and assorted institutions.

Since "you" in your original post wasn't addressed to me, I removed it to minimize the recipient confusion, not to remove the context -- besides, it was a tautology, you said it twice and I removed it just once. In any event, no harm intended. With you on this one! I would have loved to go to a school that looks like this! A colleague of mine who went to the same school wound up teaching at the Edinburgh University and I'm not terribly prone to envy but god! that work place of hers! As for me, I graduated from a 13-floor parallelepiped.

Of course there's better sources to learn modern physics! and so on. The pop east meets west books aren't a substitute for a Ph.D. in physics should one pursue it. Rather, they are a useful tool for setting some folks' skewed brains a bit straighter -- folks who've dislocated them by craning their neck to take a conceited view from the top of the ivory tower of "Real Science." And much as I hate sounding woke, for the purposes of this sentence I have to, though I swear I mean something very different from what the true followers of the doctrine mean when they say those words: Eurocentric/Western, and overwhelmingly white male as a default admission ticket for most of its developmental history, is what they really mean when they refer to "Real Science."

Yes, a long time ago. And this one, also ages ago: And this one And a favorite:

I had a horrible physics teacher in school, a horrible chemistry teacher, and a horrible math teacher. Just my luck. They were like that "if you don't eat your meat you can't have any pudding" teacher from The Wall. Borderline psychotic, mean, vengeful, corrupt, you name it. So all I did in school for those subjects was the absolute minimum I could get away with, if that. But then for some 2 months we had a substitute math teacher from another school (a specialized math-slanted school where he was one of the teachers known as genius-makers). He started giving us strange math problems of totally unfamiliar design that weren't hinged on whether you had memorized the formulas, and instead required something else, maybe pattern recognition, don't remember what exactly they were about of course. And what a shocker! -- turned out I was a natural for those, and for two months I was treated by the teacher and my surprised classmates as a math star. (We did have a resident math star, with many citywide math competitions victories under his belt, and he was sort of average with those strange different problems. He managed, but not as spectacularly as he usually did with the usual.) It was surprising and exciting. That was the first time in my life when I discovered I may have something mathematical going beneath the surface... sans the mathematical apparatus... but those two months weren't enough for it to emerge, it just peeked out through the hole in The Wall... And then our wall-building regular teacher returned and it was over. What I'm driving at is, there's not enough progress maybe at least in part because educational systems as we know them aren't catching those who could potentially facilitate it, and instead discourage some (many) potential "progressors."

Thanks. Of these I'm only familiar with David Bohm's work. While we're mentioning books that approach physics from some underexplored but potentially fruitful perspective, here's an interesting one I read a bunch of years ago and will probably return to, to see how I see it now: I am fascinated by everything Time and its phenomena (in the "physics" sense -- as are taoist sciences, for which it was the main area of study since time immemorial -- unlike in ours overwhelmingly more focused on the antics of Space phenomena). One quote from Barbour's book that stayed with me as a kind of mental meme, a reminder of sorts of "the way things really are": "The cat that jumped off the couch and the cat that landed on the floor are not the same cat."

Interesting. Sort of dovetails with my assessment -- this late in the state capitalism's day very little is random. Both in economy and in politics. Even when things are falling apart, it's not a random process, it's controlled demolition -- except perhaps for the margin of randomness always present in everything. A narrow one presently and getting narrower by leaps and bounds. Well, that's not their job description. One wall street nerd I knew quite closely for the longest time started out with a rather brilliant "pure" scientist's mind but didn't find any jobs in demand that would reward that with an actual ability to pay the bills. And then this lifestyle meticulously and inevitably extinguishes the drive to do anything other than make money, along with much else. Add to this insider trading and the unholy alliances politicians make with high tech venues toward personal enrichment and we get what we get -- technology we didn't ask for that solves nothing whatsoever on the level of anyone's personal life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.

If you are stuck in traffic, make the Kali Mudra, point it at the cars in front of you and proclaim, solemnly, Om Tat Sat! In 9 cases out of 10, the traffic will start dispersing.

Yeah, don't know about the poles -- been hearing talk about them flipping any minute now for the past 20 years so to me it's like flipping a coin... or not flipping it. Who knows. As for daylight saving time, I like what a Native American chief said about it (quoting from memory): brilliant science -- take a blanket, cut a piece of it on one end, sew it onto the other end, and voila -- you now have a longer blanket. People with small children and dogs are particularly 'excited' every time we switch the clocks... and us bazi readers hate it for an additional reason -- every time you do someone's chart you have to go check if DST was in effect that year, that month, that day at that location... ugh. It's different from year to year, country to country... and in the US, a couple of states don't switch and neither do some territories, but there's no guarantee they never did in the past when someone was born, so, still extra work even if it's a Zonie's* chart. *Zonies are people who come on vacation to San Diego from Arizona. A local phenomenon.