Maxims, rules of thumb and other observations on human cognition and sociocultural affectations

This will be added to on an irregular basis...
  • What is said to humans directly is received with skepticism and considered with dubiousness while that which is heard in passing, especially that which most conforms to their mentality or prejudices, is readily believed.
  • Humans have a certain cognitive latency between exposure to new information or experiences and the ability to think dispassionately and intellectually about it.
  • Humans have a certain cognitive spectrum starting with the moment of exposure to new information or experiences and ending with some point at which the thing is effectively "in the past" for them.
  • This cognitive spectrum is linked to the emotional process often referred to as shock, anger, denial and acceptance.
  • The more and faster information or experiences are presented to people and the closer the quarters and the lesser the distance between people, the more their early reactions in the passionate emotional stage are reflected back to them in the manner of responses to those reactions from others in light of those responses.
  • The more outrages which are suffered without sufficient time to allow emotional bleed-off, the farther the bar for subsequent reaction and outrage are pushed, and the more further events must progress before reaction and outrage.
  • It is possible for serious detriments to eventually sit below this threshold for long enough for their damaging effects to build and multiply until their entire society undergoes some reactive convulsion.
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Monday, March 17, 2008

From the "Too Much Free Time" files...

Ala. Building Can't Shake Swastika Shape -TBO.com - News From AP

From the ground, the Wesley Acres Methodist retirement home looks like any other building. But fly over in an airplane, and the outline is unmistakable: It's one big swastika.

They even mentioned the other swastika building.

Take a piece of graph paper, and draw a box around a 7x7 space. Starting from the center square, go out in all four directions from it coloring in blocks. You get a cross. Now since you can't go outside the border, you want to expand the raw footage, what do you do?

Well, you could expand off each arm to make something like the German Iron Cross. Or the tetragrammaton cross symbol. OR you could then have each arm suddenly all turn the same way at a right angle along the perimeter. Either way you get a swastika. Either facing the same way as the Nazis or the other was as used in Asia.

Simple math and geometry, simple symmetry, simple regular efficient design. Why use a swastika shape and not the cross with cross bars? Simple. The swastika design encloses four quads for greenspace out on which windows have for a view. The other design ends up more like a Bronx apartment building with windows staring directly at each other.

Look at the pictures with both links and notice the space enclosed.

Another way is to do a square building with a cross section in the center, but that is just the swastika continued to enclose a space, but with a building that side if you need a portable lift to do repairs, how do you get it inside each quad WITHOUT lifting it over by crane OR taking apart and hand carrying the many pieces through the building to the inside quads and reassembling?

And fully enclosed quads have the problem of wind shear and containment. My high school had a fully enclosed area and when the prevailing winds whipped up, were near to rattling the windows out of their frames, and even light breezes outside the school became overpowering gusts within the enclosed area as wind whipped over the roof and down into the space.

We have more than enough problems in the Jewish world without this conspiratorial nonsense that makes us look like the fundamentalist Christian kooks who look for embarrassing secret dirt on the Vatican, or the idiots who try to find 666 everywhere.