Progress into the unknown unknowns.

Tags

Bilateral symmetry, Hox gene order, Unknown unknowns

The explorations into the unknown unknowns are complicated by the obvious fact that we haven’t the slightest idea of where we are going. We are trying to make progress beyond simply pushing against the envelope of the known, and thereby moving the boundaries of the known gradually into the unknown, which is the general method of humanity and the standard of science in specific.

This series of essays is proceeding, not by reaching into the unknown and flailing randomly about, but by defining and exploring the factors that obscure our seeing into the unknowns which are in all likelihood surrounding us. It is a worthwhile pursuit because generally when anything is clearly perceived in the unknown there will be other interesting and perhaps useful things which can then be done with this new knowledge. Isolated things that don’t have a clear linkage to things which we know and understand  may be closely linked to other things which we don’t see, but which may be associated in understandable ways.

A strange observation is that the things discovered so far about seeking into the unknown seem so obvious that a child could readily observe them, and yet these are some of the tools we will use. They might seem as obvious as a hammer and saw, but it is with them that we will pursue the removing of the camouflage of walls, veils, fogs, time, space, fixity, randomness and other obscuring factors. The underlying method of new discovery is in finding new tools. We have looked at some of the obscuring factors of camouflage, and explored some of the tools for seeing past the camouflage, and have found some of the characteristics of knowledge itself.

Something obvious to a child but important for seeing past obscurity is the existence of bilateral symmetry. It is a giveaway of living organisms’ camouflage, but along with that simple observation is that all multicellular living forms, from insects to humans, have a linear arrangement of body parts. That may not seem like much of an observation, but when searching for an insect in an environment to which it has adapted camouflage it is a definable visible giveaway to its presence.

Once even a trace of bilateral symmetry is suspected it is easy to mentally project a perpendicular line between the symmetrical items and, if a new symmetry is found anywhere along that line, to make the further assumption that the head is at one end or the other along that line. The head will always have distinctive features such as mouth, feeding apparatus, eyes or other sensors like antennae. These head features may sometimes be faked at the tail end of a prey species to confuse predators, and to give the prey possessing that trait a momentary chance to depart in an unexpected direction.

The body plan along the anterior-posterior (head-tail) axis is controlled by the Hox gene, which is probably more than a billion years old, but bilateral symmetry is perhaps twice as old. That is, bilateral symmetry may go back to the beginning of DNA-controlled life forms. DNA itself is bilaterally symmetrical. The importance of this is that neither bilateral symmetry nor anterior-posterior arrangement of life forms can be modified, at present, without killing the cell, and without a successful cell there can be no life.

Bilateral symmetry may no longer be an absolute limitation, as modern gene manipulation by J. Craig Venter, of the Venter Institute, and Jennifer Doudna of UC Berkeley may permit the possibility of creating alternate life forms. I hesitate to call them life, except that they will be DNA-based, but if the researchers into life can work around the necessity for the Hox gene the living forms might be so different in behavior we might not want to call them living. It is similar to the problem as to when to begin calling a more advanced computer a sentient being. It is simply a definition when speaking in words, but the words are attempting to define some real thing.

Living giveaways will be bilateral symmetry and a standard sequential arrangement.

There is a discussion of this problem relative to human perception in Sometimes I like a nondescript photo, but why? In that post, horizontal symmetry and vertical stacking are analyzed in a way reminiscent of bilateral symmetry and the Hox gene. This cross-linking of a seemingly unrelated idea is what we are looking for when seeking to explore the unknown unknowns. Both bilateral symmetry and sequential alignment probably indicate an even deeper relationship than that the two seemingly unrelated items, DNA and artistic preference, have a set of underlying similarities. Sometimes one of these things is thought of as metaphor for explaining the other, but there may be a deeper relationship which might be projected to seemingly distant unknowns.

Cuttlefish and the search for unknown unknowns.

Tags

Cuttlefish template of camouflage, Discovering unknown unknowns, DNA driven camouflage, Theory of camouflage

The cuttlefish has such a variety of hiding and searching techniques it becomes a wonderful source for studying camouflage and for the theory of seeing through camouflage. Cuttlefish have the ability to change their skin color, texture and patterns for camouflage, both for predation and for hiding. According to Woods Hole researcher Dr. Roger Hanlon’s YouTube video cuttlefish have only three basic templates for doing this, but by blending these they have a vast repertoire enabling them to match a complex environment to near invisibility.

Cuttlefish basic camouflage templates are uniform, mottled and disruptive.

As I mentioned in Failures of camouflage – Symmetry all genetically driven DNA camouflage known to me is bilaterally symmetrical, and that is a giveaway for this type of surface camouflage.

Cuttlefish also have eyes with abilities which our mammalian eyes don’t, like a connection from their optic nerves directly to their skin-modifying camouflage cells. Each eye appears to have an independent influence on the skin. Their eyes have the ability to distinguish polarized light’s changing qualities. You can do this too by taking polarized sunglasses and rotating them while observing clouds against a blue sky. The ability to change views of polarized light greatly enhances definition of the objects, and when observed stereoscopically and simultaneously in various polarizations even greater clarity can be obtained. Cuttlefish stereoscopic vision is excellent at short ranges as is seen by their ability to precisely target food with bullet like tongues shot at tiny prey.

Cuttlefish eyes and skin from Google search > cuttlefish+eyes > images

Because the cuttlefish have such a variety of adaptations they are a subject worthy of careful scrutiny for searching all of the techniques for camouflage, and possibly discovering unknown techniques. Several things accelerate their rate of adaptation. Cuttlefish have a voracious appetite that drives the constant search for food, and they themselves are tasty food, and both of those needs drive their need for better camouflage. They have a short lifespan which permits rapid DNA evolution. The fact that they have such highly developed systems suggests that they may have other methods as yet unnoticed. One factor favoring rapid evolutionary selection for adaptations is the females selecting from the large number of male suitors, by caching several males’ sperm away from her eggs and then choosing what she considers the best one for fertilization. DNA testing has shown that the sperm chosen is that of the male best able to disguise itself as a female, and thus bypass the fierce male competitions taking place near the female. The selection isn’t based on the male’s strength, or healthy adaptation to the environment, but for its acting ability. This is a process very similar to human females’  Eveish Selection process. We must watch diligently for other forms of mate ability selection that differs from sexual selection, or natural selection or  Eveish Selection

Cuttlefish are ideal for searching into the theory of unknown unknowns.

Failure to see unknown unknowns – voluntary blindness

Tags

Methods for searching the unknown, Voluntary blindness

Why do people fail to see what is readily available to be seen? Failure to see known knowns, that is, those things that are known to be known to other people, and can be easily known to oneself, is voluntary blindness. That may appear to be a bad thing, but it’s a very good thing. There is so very much to be easily discovered in our personal lives and on the internet that we need to have filters to protect us from nearly all of it. Our daily lives are overloaded with information, and most of what is around us and readily available isn’t needed at the moment and is best ignored. I don’t need to be thinking about my winter jacket hanging in the closet, or many other personal items which at some proper time are important to be attended to. The Venetian blinds are closed, but if one of the louvers was misaligned and open it would be distracting. I own that louver, I am responsible as to how it is positioned at this moment, and yet I have never thought about it as an individual. Every particle of my house is legally mine, and yet I hopefully will never become aware of them as individuals, and will only relate to them in aggregate. Almost everything about my house, my body, in fact my whole universe I think about in simple categorical aggregates and there is a great deal about these existing physical things which I could know if I chose to know, but don’t.

It is a voluntary choice not to know nearly everything that could be known, even those things which can easily be known. We live in a world of self-imposed blindness. When we approach the subject of unknown unknowns, and unknown and probably unknowables there arises the reasonable question, “Why bother?” The hundred billion people that have existed decided not to bother with nearly all of the things around them. It is difficult enough coping with the problems confronting us using known facts and habitual responses to them, and it is generally a waste of time and effort even googling a problem to discover what other people thought. Just muddling through is quick and easy and usually works, or doesn’t and then we deal with that new problem. Looking for unknown unknowns among the infinitely larger category of unknowable unknowns takes too much effort. That unknowns do exist is obvious, and that multiple infinities of fantasy knowables lurking in the unknown also exist is obvious too, so even pausing to think “Why bother?” is a waste, so let’s move on to something important. To bother with unknown unknowns is a profound fool’s enterprise. Perhaps it isn’t insane, but it is a waste of time.

So far as I know no one has intentionally gone searching into the unknown by first exploring all of the factors which prevent seeing past the camouflage, the veils, the walls, the fog, the time, space, energy and matter that prevent us from seeing. Some explorers just head out, some have a theory based on experience, some have a mental construct how they think things ought to be. But I, silly fool that I am, am beginning by generating a field of inquiry that seeks not to find things directly, but to first find those things which prevent us from finding things.

A perfect example of discovering an unknown unknown

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Seeing obvious unknown unknowns

“But, I suspect, and who can say anything for certain about the unknown unknowns, that the most exciting revelations are going to be simple observations of something that people perceive a need for, but didn’t know it, and didn’t know how to get it, and yet when it appears they suddenly think, and say, that is obvious, and I knew it all along.”

I wrote that a few weeks ago in the post What Might An Unknown Unknown Look Like, and didn’t realize at the time I was then composing the perfect example of the idea for my upcoming six-minute talk, A Thanksgiving Tribute To Women. It is a fine example, because I was thinking about the subject of obvious things that existed before the eyes of every normal human adult that ever lived. That is some one hundred billion people who could have made the observation I presented in that sermonette, and anyone at any time in human history could have presented it to a local audience, and they would have smilingly agreed that it was valid. And yet, to the best of my knowledge no one ever made the simple statement I made. Briefly, – Women accelerated human perfection by discussing with their friends which men to marry. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace a hundred and fifty years ago recognized the problem that natural selection couldn’t create human beings, because there were too many non-selective factors to have been created in a geologically brief time. The answer to their problem was obvious, and yet they didn’t see it.

This is an obvious observation of still operating selective factors for human evolution, and I had made the simple observation, and posted the idea in the past as Eveish Selection, but, and this is the point, that this is an example of reaching into the unknown unknowns, and it went unobserved by the very mind that was searching for examples. I had posted the assumption that there were probably many examples of unknown unknowns readily available to everyone, and then I went off on a couple of weeks of writing about camouflage, veils, fogs, walls, etc., and realizing that it was an explosive field of inquiry just exploring the factors obscuring information. However, I failed to recognize an obvious example of the very hypothesis I was proposing. It is for that reason it seems obvious that by understanding those factors obscuring a clear vision of information that new things will become so obvious that it will be impossible for them to remain unobserved. When observations are written up and published they become available for other people to make connections which we have missed, and after they are published we ourselves become more objective viewers of our own thoughts and discoveries.

To perceive some unknown unknowns we need only look and verify.

The search for unknown unknowns will have its greatest feast in humans.

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Methods for searching the unknown

While considering the various camouflages of the unknown unknowns, such as natural ones like veils, walls and fogs, there continually arises the human element in how these things should be dealt with. Physical science has direct ways of approaching closer to unknown realities, and generally the approach of developing more powerful searching instruments has proved fruitful. The CERN particle accelerator has given a window into subatomic particles, and deep space has offered even higher energies for research, but as sophisticated as that type of research is, the approach is the application of keen intellects and lots of money.

When dealing with the hiding techniques used by natural DNA systems the problem becomes one of carefully exploring and observing the hundreds of millions of life forms and carefully observing their techniques for hiding from their predators and of hiding from their prey. This becomes coupled with the co-evolution of new techniques for hiding with the responsive techniques for perceiving through the new techniques. There becomes a race between the practitioners of these two systems, which often becomes so sophisticated and bi-polar that all other species are squeezed out of the competition in that dimension. When that happens there must be developed other techniques for balancing the opponents. Sometimes the final factor will be when the prey becomes so vulnerable to the search techniques that it is brought near to extinction, but when that limit is approached the prey becomes so rare that they can no longer be the primary food source for the predator, and new sources of energy must be sought by both parties that permits the prey to survive.

It would seem reasonable to suppose that considering the vast number of species to have lived that there are more techniques for evasion and for countering evasion than have been discovered. It is important to discover as many of these as possible, because behind any and perhaps all of those techniques for obscuring reality there lies a reality that may be discovered by us humans and put to new and useful purposes. Thus it is that a careful study of all living things, and their techniques for distorting reality, must be pursued. For these organisms it is a life and death struggle, and they have had a billion years to perfect their game. Of course the discovery of a technique has an element of chance associated with it, but with such multitudes of experiments being performed every second since the advent of life, there must have been a great many success stories. The discovery of these successes will be a great success for us too.

Then of course we come to human techniques for hiding their intentions, and this is where the most flexibility may be discovered. DNA must happen upon successful methods by chance, with vast numbers of chances tipping the balance to successful discoveries. With human forethought we may enter a new dimension of hiding and discovery of hiding. This sounds like it might go into evil directions quite easily, but I suspect that in practice it doesn’t, and the simple proof is that of iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma games, which show that a specific type of positive behavior almost always wins the game. This is discussed at length in The Evolution of Cooperation: Revised Edition, by Robert Axelrod. Usually the defector, once observed as a person willing to be deceitful, is punished and shunned, and when given a bad reputation and shunned it is difficult to have successful social encounters. However, before we get to these human problems it will be easier to deal with natural obscuring factors, and to explore DNA-driven competition for hiding.

Humans are still going to be the most interesting creatures.

Seeking the unknown unknowns – expanding the search

Tags

Review of the general process, The unknown unknowns.

The idea a few weeks ago was to search into Donald Rumsfeld’s famous quote about the unknown unknowns, and see what I could discover. It began with some considerations about camouflage, because that was within intentional control of human beings and therefore could be comprehended with human reasoning. These ideas were expanded by listing and exploring the various military techniques for hiding things with little cost, and generally involved surface decorations, while maintaining full functionality of the person or equipment.

When the search was expanded from military camouflage to natural camouflage used by plants and animals the whole field suddenly exploded in complexity. Vast multitudes of species were all constantly playing the game of eat and avoid being eaten, and within each of these species each individual was doing everything possible to survive. Not only playing the game constantly, but playing it in every conceivable location and situation where life could be sustained, even for a moment. Except for humans, none of these creatures was aware of its personal demise, but all were attempting to prevent personal injury while getting a meal and occasionally mating.

The end of this natural process is an infinitely vast number of adaptations in physical appearance on every perceptible physical level and of behavior. Perception and hiding have been carried to remarkable levels. The cuttlefish has carried personal camouflage to astonishing subtleties, and the mantis shrimp has developed an astonishing number of organs for perception. There are probably as yet unobserved by humans other ways of perceiving and hiding. That is what this search into the unknowns is attempting to provide: a search technique for discovering.

Discovery is the finding of things that are really there. 

Seeking the unknown unknowns behind walls.

Tags

How to reach beyond walls., Seeking the knowable unknowns, Seeking the unknown but knowables, Walls to the unknown unknowns, What's behind the walls?

Seeking unknown unknowns behind walls is different from seeking through veils, or in fog. Walls are not only generally opaque, except for glass windows and holes, but are solid and require solid efforts to physically get beyond them. Fog is easy to pass through, but it is difficult to know where you are or where you are going because of a distance component into the unknown, so some type of stable referent is needed. Veils are easy to pass beyond certain points, but they tend to cling and prevent visual observation, even when moving beyond their original position, but permit tactile palpating when pressed through. Sometimes alternate wavelengths will penetrate a veil or fog or wall. Veils are thin; they are often cheap to put in place. Sometimes a veil or other seeming obstacle can be projected onto a veil, or wall or even fogs. Perhaps other ways of creating obscurity and perceiving beyond it are found in the fundamental factors of reality – time, space, matter and energy; another realm of obscurity is excess of complexity, or simplicity, or holes created by stretching or compressing. There are many things which impede observation and create obfuscation. At any point, or along a line, or within a solid, or within any dimension there are opportunities of splitting off into wholly new directions.

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Crypsis – is a DNA-driven selected ability of an organism to avoid detection or sustained observation by other organisms.

A general list of crypsis #1:

1. Nocturnality – using low light to become obscure
2. Subterranean – living below ground avoids surface depredation
3. Stillness – not moving lessens visibility
4. Transparency – allowing light to pass through body
5. Counter-shading – illuminated side made darker, shaded areas lighter
6. Counter-shadowing – flattening to have edges blended into a surface
7. Patchiness – breaking up larger silhouette outlines
8. Patterning – making colors and shapes mimic background
9. Mimicry – looking and acting like the background environment
10. Flocking – creating confusion for predators by many random actions
11. Herding – healthy members hiding behind slower moving sick ones
12. Distance – getting far away from a predator’s habitat, migration
13. Dead – appearing dead is unappetizing to some predators
14. Deimatic – sudden faking behaviors and displays simulating threat

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A subset of crypsis –
Wall – an opaque, tough single surface which impedes observation.

The wall subset of crypsis #1 is:

1. Nocturnality – using low light to become obscure. Low light or other forms of low reflected or sensor energy for exploring complicates the search, and slows it, but does not prevent it. Perseverance furthers in low visibility situations. A wall implies total blockage, but it is unlikely to be in all dimensions.
2. Subterranean – living below ground avoids surface depredation. A subterranean location is like considering the surface of the earth as a horizontal wall combined with thickness of fog. It is difficult to penetrate and it prevents visibility, but it may have various size tunnels, with surface portals.
3. Stillness – not moving lessens visibility. Clinging to the back side of a wall would defeat scanning through the wall, unless it is a different material. Sound pulsed through the earth reveals different density objects.
4. Transparency – allowing light to pass through a body. This functions well only in defeating the scan aimed at the specific material the object is being hidden within. In other surrounding media it is probably counterproductive and solid media may be expensive to create or simulate.
5. Counter-shading – illuminated side made darker, shaded areas lighter. This functions with a specific direction of light, but is counterproductive when the illumination light is in another location. Behind an opaque wall it is wasted energy to generate unnecessary and unused camouflage.
6. Counter-shadowing – flattening to have edges blended into a surface. Things pressed flat against an obscuring object like a wall don’t cast shadows, but with extreme raking light, or other raking media any raised surface is easily exposed.
7. Patchiness – breaks up larger silhouette outlines. Patchiness can be used in all media for disrupting characteristic outline features, and behind a wall would add to its effectiveness for most scans. Walls with highly varied patches of different media would be difficult to see through with various media.
8. Patterning – making colors and shapes mimic background. Doesn’t matter through a wall, but would give some existing cover when wall is penetrated.
9. Mimicry – looking and acting like the background environment. Colors wouldn’t make much difference for hiding behind walls, but mimicking behavior of local items, on all possible dimensions, will give less visibility.
10. Flocking – creating confusion for predators by many random actions. This is hiding in plain sight, but it generates confusion and hesitancy in searchers.
11. Herding – healthy members hiding behind slower moving sick ones. Stronger members sacrificing weak ones, by exposing them, is a temporary save which empowers the predators.
12. Distance – getting far away from a predator’s habitat, migration. If prey is too far away to reach distance doesn’t matter, but even poor walls will slow a predator and expose their presence.
13. Dead – appearing dead is unappetizing to some predators. This is a desperate tactic, leaving no defense, and even behind a wall it may not work.
14. Deimatic – sudden faking behaviors and displays simulating threat. When a predator comes round a wall a sudden faked aggression may give a moment’s respite, but instant retreat is needed.

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The techniques for identifying an obscuring wall and penetrating it provide new techniques for revealing previously undiscovered but knowable unknowns. The techniques for hiding when behind an opaque wall are usually not needed, as the wall is sufficient to create obscurity. For purposes of finding unknown things within the unknowns, once an obscuring wall is passed there may be many previously unknown things which become visible. There wasn’t any need to be obscure, and no preparations were made for hiding; they were there all along to be discovered. These are the kinds of things that may have been available to every normal adult if only they had looked in the right place, or said the right words. The above forms of obscurity are enhanced by covering the body with natural surrounding materials, and pressing into the similarly sized repeated surrounding materials.

The unknowns seemed like a single subject to explore but they appear to be exploding.

Seeking the unknown unknowns behind veils.

Tags

How to see past veils., Searching for unknown unknowns, Seeking the unknowns behind veils, What's behind the veils?

Seeking the unknown unknowns behind veils is different from seeing through camouflage. Veils to the perception of reality can be naturally occurring, whereas camouflage is making things difficult to discover based on evolution of living forms by modification of DNA, or camouflage as done by humans as in covering of objects they do not want to be discovered by competitors, and recently as a gaudy fashion statement. A veil is a single obscuring surface layer which when it becomes difficult to penetrate is named a wall, and when particulate and diffuse is called fog. These different words emphasize different things about the obscuring factors, and these posts are a process of pulling apart these qualities. Camouflage is a more inclusive term as it includes human motivations and it can be more multidimensional in its obscuring and combine anything and everything.

Unknown objects may be close behind a veil or wall or distant from it, but things hidden in a fog can not be close or they are easily perceived. This post will build upon the observations posted in Seeking steps from the known knowns to the unknown unknowns. It will be modifying the sub-definitions from emphasizing crypsis, the DNA-driven selected ability of an organism to avoid detection or sustained observation by other organisms, to a veil, an opaque, sometimes tough single surface which impedes observation. Adding the dimension tough would seem to enhance a term like skin, which is tough and flexible, or shell which is tough and inflexible. I welcome these new aspects of the subject, because in exploring each of these aspects there may appear qualities of one which may not have formerly been applied to some other aspect of camouflage in its more general aspects, and that is what we are searching for. When we can perceive the obscuring factors clearly it will be easier to cope with them.

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Crypsis – is a DNA-driven selected ability of an organism to avoid detection or sustained observation by other organisms.

A general list of crypsis #1:

1. Nocturnality – using low light to become obscure
2. Subterranean – living below ground avoids surface depredation
3. Stillness – not moving lessens visibility
4. Transparency – allowing light to pass through body
5. Counter-shading – illuminated side made darker, shaded areas lighter
6. Counter-shadowing – flattening to have edges blended into a surface
7. Patchiness – breaking up larger silhouette outlines
8. Patterning – making colors and shapes mimic background
9. Mimicry – looking and acting like the background environment
10. Flocking – creating confusion for predators by many random actions
11. Herding – healthy members hiding behind slower moving sick ones
12. Distance – getting far away from a predator’s habitat, migration
13. Dead – appearing dead is unappetizing to some predators
14. Deimatic – sudden faking behaviors and displays simulating threat

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A subset of crypsis –
Veil – an opaque, tough single surface which impedes observation.

The veil subset of crypsis #1 is:

1. Nocturnality – using low light to become obscure helps the veil be more obscure.
2. Subterranean – living below ground avoids surface depredation. In this case the veil is the thick soil which covers the hidden object.
3. Stillness – not moving lessens visibility. Things behind the veil are invisible and not aided by stillness directly, but they can be revealed by touching and moving the veil, perhaps with a natural gust of wind.
4. Transparency – allowing light to pass through the body. If the object is behind the veil transparency wouldn’t change existing invisibility, but might help reveal or hide the object when the veil is penetrated.
5. Counter-shading – illuminated side made darker, shaded areas lighter. Not much help if the veil is functioning as a surface, but is helpful if applied to solid objects. It becomes counter productive if the lighting direction is changed or made strong enough that a reflection is made off the object.
6. Counter-shadowing – flattening to have edges blended into a surface. Counter-shadowing might be built into the visible side veils design. Flattening to a surface will work in any lighting situation.
7. Patchiness – breaking up larger silhouette outlines. The veil is itself an obscuring agent and the patterning on the veil hides the veil itself.
8. Patterning – making colors and shapes mimic background. This goes on the veil, and can be styled to the moment with its background, from a viewpoint.
9. Mimicry – looking and acting like the background environment. The veil is intended to conceal the background, thus the mimicry would be of the background, but it includes behavior components like texture, shape and movement. Movement of physical mimicry might be seen though a semitransparent veil.
10. Flocking – creating confusion for predators by many random actions. The members behind would be veiled by the confusing random actions of those near nearer the observer. Flocking is seen as an area chaos.
11. Herding – healthy members hiding behind slower moving sick ones. Or the opposite, the hiding of any members behind the others. Predators watch for the most easily caught, which is generally the unobservant or weakest. Herding is seen as an edge of chaos.
12. Distance – getting far away from a predator’s habitat, migration. Distance is a type of veil.
13. Splitting – when flock is pursued, split into two, with the free individuals going directly away but back toward the other retreating flock members. Each time this happens the pursued prey becomes less to the point that a final chase is one on one and a capture isn’t worth the effort. With a team of aggressors this strategy might be defeated by surrounding the prey.
14. Time – being elsewhere at critical times. “Absence of body is superior to presence of mind.” This behavior may require foresight, or learned experience.
15. Dead – appearing dead is unappetizing to some predators. Being out of sight behind a veil can be compromised by other dimensions like smell, or response to movements.
16. Deimatic – sudden faking behaviors and displays simulating threat; can be effective if an effective retreat can be quickly made, or distracting forces or distant distractions can be brought into play.

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The goal of making nearly identical lists of various ways of creating camouflage, such as veils and fogs, is that some methods might be found that fit one category but not another. However, if something works in one dimension there is a chance that with modification it will work in another. The techniques discovered for penetrating a wall might be applicable to penetrating a veil, or fog, or time, or distance, or noise or layers of conversation.

Start looking for the unknown unknowns !

Tags

Finding knowables in the unknown, Finding unknown ideas, Methods for searching the unknown

How can anyone start looking for the unknown unknowns? What can I or anyone say, except,”Watch for anything that is unusual and doesn’t fit a local environment.” Even though there have been in excess of one hundred billion people live on this earth, there are probably things which any of those people could have observed which would change our way of seeing the world. Chances are that once someone says one of these unknown unknowns that are perfectly knowable, then everyone will think, or say something like, “I knew that all along.” Isaac Newton’s laws are my favorite example. For every action there is an equal reaction. That is so simple a statement, and yet it changed the world, because it made inertia a real thing and it made it easy to compute how much force was needed to move objects. If something weighs twice as much as another object you must push twice as hard to get it to move a given distance. It is obvious, but when it is stated clearly it can be used for many more complex actions.

I suspect that many famous quotations have in them a kernel of the unknown unknowns buried in them, and that is why they carry weight. In reading A New Dictionary of Quotations on Historical Principles from Ancient and Modern Sources, by H. L. Mencken it becomes apparent that the quotations upon a given subject, which are arranged by date over the centuries, get clearer and more precise. When this process is happening, and consistently happening over thousands of years, it is a clear indicator that something even more profound is probably still there in the unknown to be revealed. All it takes is arranging a few words in just the right sequence to reveal the deeper idea.

There were old literary contests in the 1950’s offering prizes for saying something on a given topic in twenty-five words or less. It was an archaic precursor of Twitter and its limitation to 140 characters. Probably even that limiting format could be used to publish and distribute truly profound new revelations. If only you said just the right words.

I did some patent research several years ago, and discovered the same phenomenon of improvement with inventions; that is, some invention based on some obscure idea  kept getting better over the years. What was strange is that some of the patents that came out a hundred years later, and functioned much better, could have been proposed at the very beginning. One strange example of this is the symbol of terrorism, the spherical bomb with a fuse burning at the top. That was two hemispheres of molded lead held together by running a bolt through them from north to south. It was difficult to make, and didn’t contain the explosive powder very well, and thus didn’t function very well as a bomb. Nowadays the exact same type of bomb was used in the Boston Marathon bombing, but used standard home pressure cooker  pots for the container. Those can be bought at a thrift store for a couple of bucks, and will contain the explosion much better. But these are all simple pipe bombs which can be easily made from any standard plumbing pipe.

Unusual observations are difficult to remember because they have weak links to standard observation.

It is important to carry a notebook with you at all times to write down unusual observations.

Make the unknown unknowns into new and useful things.

Tags

Exploring for unknowns, Make unknown unknowns useful, Unknown unknowns

Seeking a general strategy for reaching for the unknown unknowns and making the finding of them useful.

1. Watch for anything that is unusual and doesn’t fit a local environment.
2. Seek and find nearby data points with similar characteristics.
3. Seek trends and project them, and fill in the points between.
4. Observe splitting points and study them in all dimensions.
5. Approach and view the unusual things for similarities and differences.
6. Apply alternate scan methods to discovered points, including nearby ones.
7. View data and the things from as many alternate dimensions as possible.
8. Generate alternate hypothesis’ of what might be there.
9. Test validity of detected materials against hypothesis with different methods.
10. Attempt to gestalt the various views into a grander observable coherent item.
11. Create, sustain and destroy some data points and  re-gestalt the whole.
12. Control the items behavior, and direct them into new behaviors.
13. Find new uses for the controlled items behaviors.
14. Present findings to colleagues and publish findings to the public.
15. Ask for feedback, opinions and challenges to data, observing methods, theory.
16. Combine item with existing things to make useful to the public.
17. Check on possibilities of scaling up and mass production.
18. Sell item through preëxisting channels.
19. Find alternate uses for item, and support those who seek alternate uses.
20. Remember the grander impact and prepare for environmental controls.
21. Prepare for permanent disposal of worn out and discarded items.

Seeking to make the unknown unknowns into new and useful things.