Taomeow

The hurricane/tropical storm is a couple hours away from us per latest predictions, but some fire hydrants in downtown decided to help it along ahead of schedule. Video: https://packaged-media.redd.it/k703vjwl1bjb1/pb/m2-res_1280p.mp4?m=DASHPlaylist.mpd&v=1&e=1692572400&s=6d053c7ae8deeab4e038fffffacb9f5afa090978#t=0

And here we go again. Apparently, after a bunch of years proving that the universe we live in is a simulation, they now have mathematically demonstrated that it isn't, it's 100% real and, moreover, can't be simulated. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/11/251110021052.htm Whew. Good to know. Not that I didn't... The idea that nothing is real always seemed to me as either religious "opium for the masses" so they don't take their abysmal plight to heart and don't make too many waves... if it's not real, who cares that you're poor and exploited and downtrodden, it's just illusion and in some other "more real" reality you are all-powerful... ...or the outcome of hallucinogenic drugs use that can temporarily, and sometimes permanently, cause depersonalization and the rest of the nothing is real effects... ...or, in the latest scientific incarnations, the conclusions a man of science arrives at who grew up with screens, computers, phones, video games and not with nature. The world they have been exposed to, the only one they know, is then extrapolated in their mind to the rest of the universe. Nothing is real and nothing to get hung about...

It is a belief system for the indoctrinated, but for the indoctrinators it is primarily (and often entirely) a power grab system. All our "life sciences" inherited the tradition they directly arose from -- that of witch hunts, getting rid of ideological competition, gaining both power and money, monopolizing control of people's bodies, calling the shots. (There's a pun in there.)

It is definitely foundational. How to approach it -- well, I think the best way to get into the I Ching is the way it's been used for thousands of years, as an oracle, for divination. You begin developing a relationship with it if you use it this way, hearing its voice, so to speak. There's no "foundational hexagrams," they all carry equal weight between themselves -- perhaps you meant the 8 trigrams? Won't hurt to start familiarizing yourself with those and their characteristics, but it's not necessarily the starting point. The older Wilhelm/Baynes version (not sure about the newer ones) has the overview, explains the divination procedures, and has appendices of which the Ta Chuan is IMO of utmost importance to study... eventually or gradually. I'd start very simple though, with just trying to get some answers to your real life questions and see how helpful (or not) you find what the I Ching tells you. Practice makes perfect. There's no bottom to this thing, so wherever you start, you'll be in the same position as Confucius, you always need 50 more years to study it... but 5 minutes do something useful too. My favorite is the second on the left, Ritsema-Sabbadini. I don't think it's the best for beginners though. The one I started with was the Wilhelm-Baynes version and then the one whose name you can't read in the picture and then the rest. I also have the Chinese version, but that's hard even for a native speaker -- the meaning of most words changed over thousands of years. The Ritsema-Sabbadini book is superb in that it gives you all of them, not this or that translator's (or modern native speaker's) version but everything the word ever meant throughout history. But like I said, it's hardly for a beginner -- until one can "see" and understand the hexagram and the changes even without the verbal explanations, I'd say it's step two. Step one -- I would go with Wilhelm-Baynes.

I wonder if he would still do it if he couldn't afford to change phones this often. A friend of mine once told me about her mom smashing dishes when angry. She found it pretty funny though because her mom would grab a plate, notice it's one of the nice ones, quickly put it down and smash a cheaper one. If she ever smashed one of the nice ones her daughter would know she really means it... otherwise it's just silly theatrics.

When I was in my early teens we had a TV that responded better to some of The Art of War techniques though. It was old and would attempt to conk out right when they were showing a Polish series that ran in the daytime after school, "everybody" in my class watched it and I had a crush on the main protagonist to boot. So that TV acting up right when his pretty face showed up was infuriating. I tried kindness but no go, so I would give it a beating. It worked. There was a particularly sensitive spot on its side and if you smacked it there, the pretty face reappeared and the TV behaved. Different strokes...

They had better success with robots that are not humanoid, first deployed for public use in 2020, during the pandemic, ISO contactless food and mail deliveries. There's a couple hundred of them working in Moscow, delivering something like 10,000 food order per month. Of course it's not a lot for such a large city, but they're getting more and more common in the streets. When ordering food via an app, there's an option for robot delivery. Robots pick up orders directly from partnered restaurants and cafes, then navigate sidewalks to deliver to customers. I've seen videos where they sometimes have trouble overcoming a snow drift. They have wheels, not sled runners, so they can have the same trouble with snow drifts as cars. Maybe they will equip them with snow tires or tire chains for the snowy winter... but right now, a friendly passer-by will typically just give them a push if they get stuck.

How much do you want to know? I have a collection of several (translations and explanations), could recommend some of them if you're interested. If not ready to dive into the depth of one of the world-forming accomplishments of Chinese/East Asian civilization, then brief answer -- an ancient oracle book that was the very first one to be included in the Taoist Canon. The foundation of "it all."

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.

Not just wearing them, having the Sun's production line reliably supply them. Circa 1968 the Sun entered a flat maximum reaching into the 1970s, i.e. instead of the erratic flares we all know and hate today, we got a sustained stream of energizing photons consistently nourishing yang creativity on which physics as we know it depends. Contrast it with the biggest flare ever recorded, out of the blue in 2001... That was in April and we all know what happened in September of that year. It's been like that since the 1970s -- the Sun transmitting some Morse code, which no one really bothers to try deciphering.

That's speciesism, no? Animals only interesting in what they can do for us, not for their own sake? Yes, some felines, specifically Felis Catus known as domestic cat, have been our companions for quite a while, but most don't want to have anything to do with us if they can help it... I like the shinto view - - no species is thought of as superior to any other, they are all perfect in their own habitat, on their own terms, and people are part of this arrangement, not some special case. Unless we are bent on climbing on top of the Pyramid of Extinction... I shamed myself into thinking I was too judgmental, so I decided to doublecheck and went back to the video. And the first word she uttered was "hello..." -- and my whole life's experience screamed -- "no need to listen to the rest, someone who says hello like this is a bitch." So I stopped right there the second time around. I never had spaghetti from a can so I can't be a reliable judge of it... and my quantum mechanics education is limited to extended lectures on the subject which a family member professionally in the know used to give me during long car trips (they were superb, by the way) for educational entertainment (sic) purposes. But I seem to recall that those loops on the right are sort of wrapped around the non-loopy ones on the left. If you have both varieties, you could conduct a scientific experiment, string the right ones onto the left ones, see what happens. Whether the procedure begets a universe, maybe even a better one if we're lucky, or... well, experimental evidence will tell.