Introduction I'm not good at basic math. I struggle with many things which any decent mathematician aces early. For example, a few elements of calculus still remain over my head, although I have climbed the slopes of that mountain several times. Linear algebra is only just starting to make sense to […]
I've known about the rather curious set of p-adic numbers for years, even before they started getting famous with perfectiod spaces, but I never knew there were some of the wildest insights into mathematics buried within their "weird" way of thinking. I put weird in quotes here because […]
I recently stumbled on a gem of a book called The Ancient Secret of the Fountain of Youth. As I skimmed through it, I found it to be a rather unique book, and wanted to know more about how it came to be. Chances are you found this weblog post because you're researching it like I was. Its origins […]
I migrated to a new blog engine, DotClear instead of OctoberCMS. This resolves the issues I kept encountering with comments being broken. People can now leave comments again, and they won't get lost in the ether. However, in fixing one issue, I've turned up another, which is that some very old URLs […]
A few months ago, I found that one of the more beautiful ideas I had been developing alone for several years had already been discovered by other mathematicians, who had published rigorous papers on the idea. While my own insights were not yet rigorous, they were developed well enough that I quickly […]
first written March 2000; updated 2022 "I just had one of the most rewarding meditations in my life this morning. The letter 'C' opened up for me." My father was driving late one evening, and I was riding. I looked at him. The lines of his face reminded me of Leonardo da Vinci, whose […]
External Network Asset Discovery and Vulnerability Scans This is a list of OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) tools which will quickly give you an awareness of your cybersecurity risk profile. I put this list together when someone said they were quoted $40,000 for security analysis, and wondered if […]
cedar@nowhere:/opt/bitnami$ sudo /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh restart Restarting services.. Job for bitnami.service failed because the control process exited with error code. See "systemctl status bitnami.service" and "journalctl -xe" for details. cedar@nowhere:/opt/bitnami$ sudo […]
cedar@nowhere:~$ sudo /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh status Cannot find any running daemon to contact. If it is running, make sure you are pointing to the right pid file (/var/run/gonit.pid) cedar@nowhere:~$ cd /opt/bitnami cedar@nowhere:/opt/bitnami$ ls apache bncert-tool bndiagnostic-tool […]
I've been training a GPT-J instance to write a cybersecurity blog post, using blog posts I wrote over the past year to help it understand the idea. After a lot of back-and-forth, I got the GPT-J (The Amazing Jipidy-Jay) to write the following: [Title]: Qwerty, 'The' World's Largest Ransomware […]
(Note: The two spherical illustrations from this weblog post are taken from a post which I wrote last year; compare with this illustration for Wheel Theory from Wikipedia) It's true that the original discovery by others goes back to 1999, and the first serious paper on this new branch of mathematics […]
I just confirmed a hunch using Wikipedia in the manner where it excels: providing well-known facts which are not controversial. My hunch was that logical positivism traces directly back to the deep insight Wittgenstein introduced as the concluding statement of his Logico-Tractatus, where he makes a […]
What worked for me to resolve this issue was to ensure that USB was set to 2.0. It all worked as expected as soon as I went in to Settings for the VirtualBox and selected the following (Use USB 2.0): […]
I found a fascinating article on a weblog from 2016, and eventually wrote a comment on the post. However, it's been six years, and the author has moved on to other weblogs, so my comment sits in her moderation queue, where it may sit forever. So I'm posting it here. The weblog post in question is […]
I recently stumbled on a gem of a book called The Ancient Secret of the Fountain of Youth. As I skimmed through it, I found it to be a rather unique book, and wanted to know more about how it came to be. Chances are you found this weblog post because you're researching it like I was. Its origins […]
This post is explained in the preceding post. Below is a transcript of the following video: ARTHUR M. YOUNG's WHY SEVEN? (TEACHING SERIES) (YouTube) Why Seven? To explain seven we have to go to the torus. The torus is one of the most common phenomena in nature, for example the vortex in air. The […]
I have discovered the joy of learning Arthur M. Young's remarkable insights. I have not read his books yet, but stumbled into his online writing recently, and realized quickly how he is a brilliant intuitive -- indeed he has an exceedingly rare way of seeing the world, with deep insights into the […]
The other day, I was tweaking the symmetry of the Fano plane, as described in a previous post, and ended the experiment by pondering whether there was more to the idea than I could see. A few days passed, and then today, while I was reading a completely unrelated description of energy flowing into a […]
While reading John Baez's article on octonions, I came upon the illustration of the Fano plane familiar to anyone who has studied octonions for at least 60 seconds. I've seen it many times before and pondered again at what riddles remain buried in its symmetrical shape. Then as the article […]
In studying the meaning of meaning, the will to meaning, and the meaning in how purport and import align -- these are the two meanings of every word in a sentence* -- it becomes clear: Understanding meaning is enlightening; understanding the meaning of meaning is empowering. The more we seek […]