This is a subject of my mullings that comes round fairly regularly.
Our western society attaches a much higher value to money than it's true worth. If our society were based on a barter system, the trade of objects or time would render this over valuation null and void.
I'm sure I could probably google around for a while and find papers by economists, psychologists and sociologists (oh my) on the subject, and I am sure their points of view are all perfectly valid but I suspect would miss the mark in being human terms.
How much value for instance would one place on such human experience as love, respect, family or simply the act of spending quality time with someone. These things are often termed as priceless, a term a certain money based organisation hijacked, yet often termed of a lower or non-significant value when money comes into the equations in some sort of way, even tangentially thus opening the question of disproportionate value of money.
The other thing I have contrasted is banks. If we were bartering than my time helping you might be expected to be returned as a like amount of time. This is something people routinely do with friends. Imagine if you helped your friend for a few hours and interest were accrued for the return help. I know things don't work that between friends, but this was simply to illustrate the notion of the value of money verses a barter equivalent.
Saturday, 31 March 2018
Tuesday, 27 March 2018
Units in the natural world
For some time now I have had this notion about numbers, and the math thereof, in the natural world compared to the numbers used in math.
Our current math system is pretty much centered around the use of digits, mostly base 10 with some recent excursions into other bases (2 used in high tech for instance). One could argue that the ancient greeks had a propensity to enjoy base 60 and base 360, but I digress - who me, already...
Our use of numbers and the development of a math system surrounds the use of our digits, steered by our nominal 10, fingers and thumbs.
Looking to the physical world, we see some particularly odd numbers cropping up, however. For instance, perhaps most well known is the ratio of a circle's diameter to it's circumference, PI, being 3.14159 etc. But there are other interesting numbers. For instance the Euler number, e being 2.71828 etc, or the golden ratio and the Fibonacci sequence, 1.618etc.
These are just a few numbers to illustrate the interesting numbers that crop up in the sciences.
What if these numbers are the units in some other numbering system that govern the math of the universe?
Our current math system is pretty much centered around the use of digits, mostly base 10 with some recent excursions into other bases (2 used in high tech for instance). One could argue that the ancient greeks had a propensity to enjoy base 60 and base 360, but I digress - who me, already...
Our use of numbers and the development of a math system surrounds the use of our digits, steered by our nominal 10, fingers and thumbs.
Looking to the physical world, we see some particularly odd numbers cropping up, however. For instance, perhaps most well known is the ratio of a circle's diameter to it's circumference, PI, being 3.14159 etc. But there are other interesting numbers. For instance the Euler number, e being 2.71828 etc, or the golden ratio and the Fibonacci sequence, 1.618etc.
These are just a few numbers to illustrate the interesting numbers that crop up in the sciences.
What if these numbers are the units in some other numbering system that govern the math of the universe?
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