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Majority
If out of one hundred people voting on something, fifty-one vote for, forty-eight vote against, and one abstains, then the fifty-one "for" have the "majority." They have a mathematical majority.
Under certain legal systems, if I turn twenty-one, I come into my "legal" majority. I can now claim the estates, moneys, titles held in trust for me since my father (or uncle, or whoever) died however many years ago.
If the numerical majority is color blind then I may be the only one, or one of a few, to see the bluebird: the majority sees a gray-bird.
If I control the weapons, the jails, the police, the courts, the academics ... the numerical majority will call it a bluebird. Because I have the political majority.
If I have the one and only hydrogen bomb, I will soon control the weapons, the jails, the police, the courts, the academics ... But already I have the majority: of coercion.
On the other hand if I am both intelligent and imaginative, have both integrity and honesty, if my honesty is simultaneously intellectual and spiritual, if I am careful about both definitions and facts ... then I have neither a political, a legal, nor a numerical majority. Not only that, I will have no meaningful vote. For the political, legal, and numerical majorities will never hear a word I say.
Man
Homo sapiens: a predatory ape, running in gangs, commonly deluded.
Obituary?
He talked a lot.
Nigel Calder
Nigel Calder
Memory
Once you understand something, you don't have to remember it: you live it.
Memory can erode. Memory can be covered over: like geological strata. Buried memories may sometimes be unburied.
Macroinformation
Macroinformation is to information what beauty is to a woman.
Miracle
Miracle. The miraculous. What a deep emotional resonance it has!
What does it mean? It means that whatever it is happened (or seemed to happen) without our being able to explain how.
Any society with a population greater than some small threshold will naturally divide into subsets: the largest will continue to see a miracle even after smaller subsets have explanations to offer. No society will have a population uniformly competent to appreciate or refute the candidates. Miracle fits not all, but most.
Music
A scale is a counting system ...
A rhythm is a counting system ...
Music is a coherent set of discrepancies among counting systems.
Discrepancy is key. Discrepancy as in macroinformation!
Note that scales are odd numbered: 7! 5!
Note that the 7-base scale becomes even if you count All of the accidentals: 12! (A mystic number, the base for Babylonian math.)
Note that once you make an octave the number becomes even: and THEREFORE there is no middle! The V is oddly between the two tonics. The V is up 5 from the lower tonic, but down IV! from the higher tonic.
Odd, odd, odd. Asymmetry within the symmetry.
And as you get into the other scales, the weird minors, the ascending scale may be additionally different from the descending scale!
These few differences spawn infinities of additional differences.
Myth
Myth: truth told in a form which passes censorship because no one sees its applciation to them: to the culture.
Can you distinguish between myth in its degenerated modern sense of falsehood—and—myth in its classical sense of cultural truth: truth beyond fact: the essence of a world view? My Knatz.com / Teaching / Scholarship / Myth / directory is yet to be recreated at a blog.
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