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C00002 00002	ideas[f85,jmc]		
C00006 00003	1985 Oct 22 - Controllable configurations of gravitational masses
C00010 00004	Bad effects of Stanford on children
C00013 00005	Nov 28 - variants of circumscription
C00014 00006	Dec 27 - Animal learning
C00016 00007	Dec 27 - Christmas present equity commission
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ideas[f85,jmc]		

Oct 15 - Sociology of fighting

	In primitive societies young men fight a lot.  They are also
inclined to engage in collective fighting, ranging from gang rapes
to wars.  In modern society fighting seems mainly limited to lower
classes and underdeveloped countries.  The academic world in particular
very rarely experiences physical fighting, and the American academic
world is extremely peaceful, and not merely physically.

	It seems to me that the phenomenon that has to be explained
is the peacefulness rather than the fighting.  If we understood it
better, we might get some ideas on how to extend it to the parts
of society and the countries in which fighting is more prevalent.

1985 Oct 22 - Controllable configurations of gravitational masses

Suppose we want to move suns around.  We can imagine it
being done in the following way.  There is a mutually
interacting configuration of masses ranging in size from
those we can move with rockets to the suns.  The goal is
to use the gravitational energy of the system to move
the suns controlled by moving small masses with rockets,
having them affect somewhat larger masses, have these
affect still larger masses till we get to the suns.
This is subject to the laws of conservation of linear
momentum, angular momentum and energy (the latter since
we can add very little energy with the rockets).  Conservation
of linear momentum means that if we want to translate the
system as a whole, we must shoot off some of its mass in
the opposite direction, i.e. we must eject some of the
suns.  We can perhaps pick up other suns.  Our basic source
of energy is gravitational.  Thus after a while the suns
are closer together.  It isn't obvious what constraints
are imposed by conservation of angular momentum.

These actions are going to take a long time.  My conjecture
is that to make a substantial change in the motion of
a body of mass  M1  by controlling a mass  M2  will take
roughly  M1/M2 years, where a year is some characteristic
time of that part of the system and would correspond to
the time of revolution around a still larger primary.  Therefore,
it is advantageous to use systems with short years, i.e.
in which the bodies are as close together as possible.
The limit is that the bodies mustn't touch and
mustn't come within each others Roche limits except when
they're small enough to be strong.  Therefore,
we should use bodies as compact as can be obtained, so
black holes would be best and neutron stars second best.
Ordinary planets have ``years'' of the order of hours.

Ideally we want a configuration that can be steered by
ejecting mass and which can pick up masses one order
of magnitude larger than the largest mass already in the
system.  Much larger masses can be used for the gravitational
slingshot effect, but they may be few and far between.
When we shoot off a pair of masses that are much closer
together than they were originally, we can take off
their original potential energy.

The problem is to invent the desired configurations
and show that they have the right properties.  Perhaps
they can even be plane configurations.
Bad effects of Stanford on children
There are two phenomena in Stanford as a community that may adversely
affect the performance of children.

1. They are mostly smart kids, so the average one of them doesn't
have the opportunity to stand out that he would have in the
an average community.

2. They are not on the average as smart as their fathers because
of reversion towards the mean.  Even if no standards are explicitly
set, most of the children will not find it possible to achieve
what they regard as an appropriate level of performance.

The effect may be to create a subculture with a tendency
to devalue academic performance.

Most faculty and their wives understand that parental level
performance is not guaranteed or even likely and resolve to
accept their children for whatever they turn out to be.  The
most likely implementation of this is not to discuss ability
levels with the children.  This is doesn't work, because the
children can observe for themselves a lot about how smart
they are, how smart their parents are, and how smart their
peers are.

Any selective community, e.g. a community that selects religious
enthusiasts, will find that the average of their children will
not have as much of the quality selected for as they do.  This
is likely to lead to disappointment and the instability of the
community.  If the Israeli kibbutzniks originally selected
themselves for communitarian idealism, the second generation
doubtless found itself not living up to the ideals of the
parents.  There is no explicit recognition of the statistical
inevitability of the phenomenon in Amos Oz's
``A Quiet Place'', but maybe there is Israeli literature in
which it is explicit.  The tendency I have seen is that the
parents blame themselves for not having properly educated
their children.
Nov 28 - variants of circumscription
suppose we ask that E be minimized not with respect to all
changes but only "infinitesimal changes", actually minimal
changes.  That a change is minimal may be another circumscription,
i.e. we want minimal changes in Z that preserve A(Z).

Dec 27 - Animal learning

It would be important to know what animals actually learn in the wild.
Consider a predator like a wolf or bear that ranges over a large area.
It is plausible that these animals, either individually or in groups,
learn the geography of their ranges --- how to get from here to there,
the location of water, where to expect prey or other food, at what
times of the year different relevant phenomena can be expected at
different places.  They may also learn the boundaries of their ranges.
An experiment to test this could be arranged.  Imagine two populations
that have been inhabiting their ranges for some time being suddenly
trapped and exchanged.  One supposes that they would initially be
less well adapted to their new ranges than the old inhabitants had
been, they would behave differently than they had in their old ranges
or than their predecessors in the new range.  They might suffer
population loss or reduced reproduction for this reason.  These things
would be interesting to observe.

One looks for both individual learning, presumably dominant in bears,
and group learning, more likely in wolves.
Dec 27 - Christmas present equity commission

People are now allowed to give Christmas presents to whomever
they like in whatever measure they like.  Clearly this presents
opportunities for discrimination on the basis of race, sex or
political or national affiliation.  It can be corrected by requiring
everyone to submit his proposed list of Christmas presents to a
local commission that would strictly correct errors of this kind.