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Last September I rented a Corolla ( >3%2 the mpg of my low millage `94 4WD Rodeo ) to drive to the MinnowBrook 2011 APL implementors retreat in the Adirondacks organized by Roy Sykes and Garth Foster .  I stopped along the orbit to see old friends and family around Chicago and Rochester , NY on the way out , and NYC ( catching Ron Paul at Webster Hall )  , Miami of Ohio , and Cadiz , KY on the return .


In Chicago , I met with Joe Bast  of the Heartland Institute and chatted about the Essential PhysicsClimateWiki .  Joe commented that he wished our chat had been videoed . ( I had in fact bought for the trip a Nikon  P300 and  neat Joby "Gorillapod" capable of the task . ( See eg : Salvador Rosillo translates his Yo y Dinero . ) )

That , so far as I know ( and I'm always looking ) there is no page on  the web where one can  find  a competent , much less executable  ,  explication of the most basic calculations of planetary temperature  is an indictment of what the Global Statist fraud against the building block of the biosphere has done to the teaching of science . One continually sees all sorts of sophisticated mathy arguments on one side or the other of this absurdity , but no place where a quantitatively capable individual can find the path from the most basic physics to these lofty nuances . All these academic exercises are over a total change in our observed temperature since the invention of the thermometer of perhaps 0.3% .  Expressing this same most basic  ,  Ivar Giaever , a real Nobel winner , comments : 

I found that the general belief is that the average surface temperature over the whole earth for a whole year has increased from ~288 oK to 288.8 oK in roughly 150 years, i.e. 0.3% and that it is due to increased CO2.  If this is true, it means to me that the temperature has been amazingly stable.

Giaever also passes on a very concrete quantitative question which would be great to see solved , in executable language , on EP .

The harm this fraud is doing to particularly the economic welfare ( to be redundant ) of duped citizens  of Europe and Australia and on the horizon for US is enormous .

The goal of the Essential Physics page is to strangle this criminal anti-life scam in a necklace of crystalline  computations . EP is taking the classical reductionist approach and so far has only reached the computation of the temperature corresponding to the energy density of a point in our orbit . But that starting point for any  quantitative understanding of our observed temp explains 97% , all but 10 degrees , of our observed 288.8 kelvin .  This is 3 times closer than ubiquitous extreme computation you will find , eg , at Wikipedia.org/Black_body_radiation #Temperature_between_a_planet_and_its_star .  

There's a convergence in my welcoming the opportunity to initialize such a potentially important educational resource and my having lived my adult life in APLs .  Ken Iverson conceived of his linearization and generalization of applied mathematical notation into computer executable language , engendering APL , culminating in J , as a tool of thought -- and that is the aspect which enamored me when I was facing the necessity of groking multidimensional geometry if I were to have a hope of making progress towards my goal of understanding how brains work so I could get a notion of what doesn't work right in my brother Jack's .

But ,

If you're really good at computation ,
 the most valuable computations are those with currency symbols attached .

Thus the market for modern APLs  tends towards what's now being called "Big Data" and "high-frequency trading" . While I've always considered such scalability intrinsic in the structure of the notation , I have always been more interested in its use a personal tool of thought : as an ultimate computational notebook .

To me , to understand something is to express it in computable form so I can "play" with it . The notation I have used in the computations on EP  are in Arthur Whitney's K language which is the product of his life implementing APLs for global investment banks .  I am almost certainly the only person to have created an interactive workspace environment in it to serve my daily log and to handle family accounting . Translating the fundamental vocabulary I have implemented in Arthur's notation on the EP page to more accessible APLs is rather trivial for a competent APLer and I have structured tables  to accept translations in any programming language one prefers .

To give a sense of the expressive power of these languages evolved from the notation of matrix algebra , here's the function in K for the temperature of a ball ( point ) from a table , TP , of temperatures and portions of its surrounding sphere .

PointTemp : {[ TP ] ( +/ ( TP 1 ) * ( TP 0 ) ^ 4 ) ^ % 4 }

Insert a temperature of 5778 for the sun and 3 for the cosmic background , and the portions of the sphere around us the sun covers , 0.0000054 , and doesn't , 0.9999946 , and out pops the 279 kelvin mentioned above .

An only slightly more complicated expression at CoSy.com/Science/TemperatureOfGrayBalls calculates the temperature of balls with different gray values in different directions . It can reproduce the extreme number based on the notion that Earth's surface has an emissivity of 0.7 with respect to the sun's spectrum ,  yet radiates with an emissivity of 1.0 , that of a black body .

And slightly more complicated than that , an equilibrium temperature can be computed  for any spectrum or spectral map of the ball and the sun .  Then such questions can be answered as "if the earth had the spectrum of CO2 itself , what would its temperature ? " . More cogently , since the vast majority of the earth's surface is liquid water ,  what temperature would a ball with the spectrum of water come to in our orbit ?

To answer such questions , and indeed calculate the temperature implied by any spectral map of the globe , is not more than a handful of additional definitions in modern APL . But I'm essentially just a really good quant programmer who got involved in this debate only because the nonscience I saw being marshaled against life and liberty so offended the most basic physics I learned as a grade school geek during the Eisenhower administration .

I invite , and the ClimateWiki needs , input from those with more expertise in spectral data source , and the whole of planetary physics for that matter , to supply the grist for the computations .

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What are the max and min possible mean temperature
 of a ball in our orbit ?

In the lieu , lacking actual spectra , I plan two computations which I have never seen and doubt the journeyman "climate scientist" has a clue how to do : calculate what the maximum and the minimum temperatures for any opaque uniformily colored ball in our orbit approximating the sun's spectrum with Planck's function . Perhaps I should start a pool  for people to place their guesses as to the results . It certainly is the sort of computation which should be in quiver of any undergraduate seriously studying "climate science" .  Yet they act as if these limits don't exist .

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The thrust of all of the foregoing is to make apparent that a rather thorough model of planetary temperature , including orbital dynamics , can be created in not more than a couple of pages of well factored APL as opposed to the notoriously bloated spagetti code in legacy languages which have been revealed by , for instance , ClimateGate . It is not at all uncommon for one line of APL to do the job of , and be more flexible and general than , an entire page of Fortran or equivalent language .

I am bluntly seeking angels who see the value of having such a transparent open vocabulary available to all students on the world wide web . This work receives no funds from the Heartland Institute .


4th.CoSy :
A number of significant programming languages and software systems have been collateral creations of some more focused purpose .  Arthur Whitney's K , and before it A+ at Morgan Stanley , were created to give the institutions an edge in their quantitative trading . Here , the motivating task is educational  -- to bridge a chasm created by the decline of and bias in tax-funded education over recent decades .

At Minnowbrook , Roy Sykes introduced my main talk with the question :  what the hell did I mean by a

CoSy "K-Tree" Structured Open Intel Forth Generalized APL Environment .

I'll leave that question to be asked by people who are truly interested in the teky details , and just make some general comments .

The creation of computing language is an ultimate intellectual pursuit building on the enduring insights of giants . In creating 4th.CoSy , the path Ken Iverson initiated informs the crystalline definitions of vocabulary which allow the succinct expression of computations on finite data ; that of Chuck Moore , how to construct a minimal dictionary capable of extending itself directly in the language of the silicon .

These are both languages which are seen as intelligence amplifiers in which bright individuals can realize remarkable systems , but the mass market programmer often just makes a mess .  It has always been my contention that there is a far larger universe of "APL capable" people in the larger business world than those who have the patience to be hired programmers . The response of a number of senior executives who found the CoSy of the late 1980s more to their natural way of thinking than other systems they were offered reinforces that belief .

A hallmark of CoSy environments since the very earliest has been the ability to write lines for the machine to interpret  right in the middle of text meant purely for human consumption . If you tap the enter key , it simply acts like a text editor . However , a function key has been programmed to pass the line to the interpreter in which the whole environment itself is written to be executed and any result displayed .

Click on the screen shot of 4th.CoSy as it exists today in Ron Aaron's Reva.Forth to see it full size . As can be  seen , it is in use as my daily log . The line in blue has just been executed by tapping the F6 key displaying my ToDo list for editing in the result window . Replacing the 0 in the line with 1 would display my ref  variable in which I keep all my passwords , etc .

Even after all these years , this computational notebook aspect of CoSy appears to be unique , but it is instrumental in my working thru such problems as the ConicAllConnect  vision for the World Trace Center site , or the computations of the temperature of radiantly heated balls , both done in legacy K.CoSy .

The considerations which bear on the structuring of a language are such as to require total immersion in the task for substantial blocks of time .  This is even more difficult than to find the time to advance the presentation of the computational physics of planetary temperature .

That's why my main goal for the coming year is to garner support for this work gaining the synergies of using the elaboration of the planetary model to support the evolution of the language in which it is executably expressed .  Perhaps the optimal situation would involve teaching because young brilliant students can  unfold seeds of ideas in fresh directions with energy and time hard to muster when one has more mature responsibilities .

Please contact me with or post here any suggestions , contacts , or potential collaborations .  These are powerful technologies and and important issues .

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