The Mystery of the Dual Use Conifer

The conifer had presented much of the puzzle to the team of scientists who were studying the aspect of the squirrel and the acorn. The question had begun with the study of the squirrel; where did the squirrel go when it was raining, where did it go when it was cold, where did they appear from first? This line of inquiry had led to the extremely tall conifer, and the result was that the team of scientists were sitting on a balcony in Montana watching this conifer with a happy bemusement. Their happiness was not so much due to the conifer as it was due to the clement weather and the light breeze and the glasses of ice and the bottle of scotch that sat on the ledge of the balcony.

There was another side to this story, however. A graduate assistant was sitting across from the research expert staring at the glass ash tray intently. But the research expert had noticed this glance and was alarmed; was the graduate assistant intent on stealing his ash tray? He looked back and forth between the ash tray and the research assistant, and indeed it seemed that the assistant had an interest in the ash tray, but the expert was worried about thinking of such an accusation against the assistant; but he was also worried about his ash tray.

Suddenly his phone rang. It was inside the house. This created a dilemma for the expert; should he answer the phone or should he watch the ash tray? He could not do both at the same time, and the phone rang again. "Research assistant, go bring me the phone," said the expert craftily; this was why he was the expert. The research assistant went into the house and the ringing suddenly stopped.

"Hello?" said the research assistant. "Yes one moment." He brought the cordless phone over to the expert, who put it to his ear, all the while looking at his ash tray. "It's the physicist."

"Hello," said the expert.

"Hello," said the physicist on the other side of the phone. "Are you still researching the quantum particle we placed in the conifer, in addition to your study on the squirrel?" asked the researcher who worked at the same university as the expert. In fact, they were working on the same cross-discipline grant at this very time and taking turns leaving the university to take measurements for a month and then switching to teach class. But the expert hesitated; he had completely forgotten that he was in charge of a cross-discipline task force.

"Maybe," he said, carefully avoiding answering the question. This is why he was the expert.

"Maybe? What do you mean?" asked the physicist. The expert looked into space, thinking, and then quickly returned his gaze to his ash tray, which was fortunately still on the ledge. He tried to hand the phone to the assistant.

"I think it is the wrong number," said the expert, trying to look highly concerned, and facing the receiving end of the phone away from his face so the physicist would not hear him.

"No, it's the physicist," said the research assistant. The expert suddenly remembered that the research assistant had answered the phone first, but he did not know if the physicist had said he was the specific physicist they were working with, or if he was just a physicist. This was crucial information, because depending on what the physicist had said, he could reasonably tell his assistant that this was the wrong physicist.

"Who is this?" he demanded, putting the phone back to his ear.

"Dr. Hiford of OU's cross-discipline grant study," said the physicist, "is this Dr. Bozon with?-" The expert interrupted him.

"Did you introduce yourself to the assistant in a general or specific way?" he asked crossly.

"Why do you ask that?" asked Dr. Hiford, who was also an expert. Dr. Bozon hesitated; this was not going well at all. He looked back at his ash tray, which was still on the ledge. The research assistant whispered at him, 'tell him we'll call him back'. This was good advice, and the expert suddenly remembered why he had hired this assistant instead of some of the other assistants, and suddenly felt bad for thinking the assistant wanted to steal his ash tray, even though it was still certainly possible that he had that intention.

"Let me call you back," said Dr. Bozon, and hung up the phone abruptly. He looked over at the research assistant. "I think that is the physicist with whom we are supposed to be doing the cross-discipline grant study," observed Dr. Bozon neutrally.

"Yes that was him," said the assistant.

"Hmm," said the expert. "Well for a moment I thought I had an adversarial relationship with the physicist, because we took none of the measurements, and I was preoccupied with - eh - with something else, but I fear that we may have made him suspicious," said the expert bluntly.

"Yes it would have been better if you had not made him suspicious," agreed the research assistant.

"I am glad you agree," said the expert congenially, remembering why he had hired this assistant, and then looked over at his ash tray compulsively.

"Why do you keep on looking at the ash tray?" asked the assistant.

"Oh! I thought it was you who was looking at the ash tray," said the expert.

"Well because you keep on staring at it every three seconds," rejoined the assistant. The expert wasn't sure if he believed the assistant's explanation. Then suddenly occurred to him that from an objective perspective, it could just as well be he himself that wanted to steal the ash tray. But this depended on whose ash tray the ash tray was exactly.

"Whose ash tray is this?" asked the expert after a few moments.

"I think it came with the laboratory," said the assistant.

"Well that solves nothing," answered the expert unhappily. The assistant was confused; sometimes it was difficult to tell what the expert was thinking. It started raining a bit and the expert started smoking again, sitting back under the cover of the balcony. He stared at a nearby conifer and looked to see if there were any squirrels in it. There seemed to always be more squirrels in the nearby oak tree, but this was odd because although acorns came from oak trees, the conifer should have more squirrels because the conifer was much bigger than the oak tree. Suddenly the phone rang again.

"Don't answer it!" warned the expert.

"It's probably the physicist," said the assistant, who was finishing a second glass of scotch.

"I know," said the expert. "We need to figure out what to do with all the data we didn't collect for his weird quantum experiment. Do you think he's an important physicist? Will the school be mad if we don't do his study?" asked the expert.

"I don't know, I'm never in the physics building," said the assistant diplomatically.

"Okay, well go bring over the papers that detail the measurements we're supposed to be taking," decided the expert. A moment later the expert was sifting through the papers, infuriated.

"This could be ruining my experiment! All their equipment is in my conifer!" shouted the expert angrily, jumping out of his seat. "How am I supposed to see the conifer squirrel interaction with these confounded variables!" he threw all the papers on the ground and stomped them into the wet wooden floor boards of the balcony.

"Wasn't someone supposed to check that the experiments were mutually possible before you agreed to the grant," asked the assistant, cautiously.

"Yes, someone, exactly!" said the expert. "We need to find that someone. That someone that ruined my hypothesis!"

"Well you must have signed the grant yourself at some point, right?" asked the concerned the assistant. The expert sat back down resignedly. "But what are the odds of that? This conifer is an extremely rare, obscure tree. Out of all the experiments a physicist would do, why would it involve a tree? And why would it involve precisely this certain type of rare tree? And beyond that, why would he choose to use this exact tree, right in front of the laboratory? The odds are beyond small!"

"Well maybe that is how the school chose this mutual cross-discipline study," said the assistant.

"Perhaps it's possible, I won't deny that, but remember, correlation- not causation!" said the expert circumspectly. He lit another match and began to smoke. He looked down at all the wet papers crumbled at his feet. They were thoroughly illegible. "Fax the physicist and have him send another copy of our project description. Tell him we have the original, we just want to make sure that we are in touch with the office of the real physicist to honor the confidentiality of the project," he decided cleverly. This was why he was the expert.

How Literature is Religious

Literature is a story where the plot, which describes or reflects reality, converges with transcendent meaning, as implicitly illustrated by characters, dialog or occurrences that have symbolic meaning. The plot is either taken directly from reality, and translated into words, or rearranged from reality. The notion that reality itself has transcendent meaning is a religious idea, and the extent to which a work of literature uses symbolic meaning to subtly but accurately express hidden ideas embedded in reality is often the standard by which good literature is separated from bad literature. 

The idea that reality has hidden meaning is based on the idea that reality itself is intelligent, and humans, as part of reality, interact, say and do things that can reveal a constant purpose above their individual intentions. Good literature takes situations from reality and aligns them in such a way that this transcendent meaning becomes manifest, through the reader's assumption of the author's own purpose in writing something. A person who does not believe in religion may think that any convergence between thought and reality is either coincidental, emerged by evolution, whereby man's thought process was formed by its environment, or that symbolic meaning is an amusing but misled invention of man. 

The American transcendentalists explicitly described the link between reality and literature. Walden's pond is not just a pond, but an intelligent idea in the mind of God. A mountain is a topographical feature, but it is also the place where water originates but immediately leaves, an arrogant pile of rocks reaching toward the sky, which does provide water, but where the water immediately leaves to humbler places, as soon as it becomes warm.  

A person who is not religious may hold these ideas to be primitive and anthropomorphic, yet these are the sort of ideas on which literature and especially poetry is established. Good literature and poetry can also endure over centuries, because the sensations and similarities between man's mind and the associated aspect of reality do not change. A mountain suggests the same ideas millennia ago as it does today, even if people focus on different aspects of a mountain, they are not contradicting the other aspects.  

The sensation of being near a mountain or a river or a beach is enriched by its divine aspects, that is what the thing projects in thought, rather than physicality. However, such introspection is considered to be primitive or pointless by anyone that holds that creation is random. If one purports this view, they must also hold that those insights in literature, formed by loyal description of reality, cannot be considered insights at all. 

One might disagree and say that these insights are insights and intelligent, but they are created by man selectively choosing aspects of reality that are not random to him or have special significance to him,  or in other words, that people see what they want to see, which is partially true. But then how does literature, by its primitive consideration of reality, tend to point out insights that were previously hidden to most people? How does reality teach lessons to the people perceptive to it? If reality was randomly formed, and a man is an inland of consciousness within it, wouldn't anything he tossed into that ocean get randomly swept away? 

The non-religious perspective has to rely on two fallacies in all such arguments: That if we don't know something to be true, it must be false (or we should hold it to be false); second, that if our perception is guided by our own minds, then everything else must be considered as only a figment of our minds*. These sort of arguments dominate the university and liberalism, but it must be recognized that these views require literature to be nonsense, or at least a primitive amusement man generates by himself.  These are both assumptions, and they diminish cultural life, and predispose people away from developing the literary and analytical aspects of their minds. All scientific developments are based on theories, which are essentially structured metaphors, and once these theories are developed and become institutionalized, the force that made the discoveries is hidden away. This shame of symbols can only lead to scientific bias and stagnation. 

*This fallacy can be exploited. A person who does not believe that the mind has any spiritual superiority will point out that when a person closes his eyes, a tree is still there in another's perspective. Then if countered with the existence of the physical universe including that tree, he has to admit that we cannot really prove that the tree is actually there, and that it is not only a mutual perception, or that that mutual person is actually a perception. 

Empirically, when he closes his eyes, he has to state the tree is not there when asked if he can see the tree. Thus if he is to lend any credence to empiricism, he has to acknowledge the superiority of other aspects of the mind over perception and empiricism, since empiricism causes him to make empirically incorrect observations. (He has to rely on the first view, that other people exist, and these people can see a tree when he can't, possibly including any sort of phenomena that the non-religious deny based on a request for empirical evidence.)  

The Theory of Why People Get into Fights with Belligerent People

Two Defense Mechanisms: Convergent Displacement and Distraction Displacement

Convergent Displacement

People have low tolerance for the traits in other people that they don't like in themselves. For example, a person that is aggressive has low tolerance of the aggressiveness of another person (one reason why fights may occur). Another example is that a person who is highly critical of other people notices when other people are highly critical of each other, and tends to criticize this. A person who is suspicious of other people may prescribe ulterior motives to other people. 

A few distinctions: Perceiving one's own traits in places where they may or may not be there. 

  Confronting one's own traits in other people, especially when they are there.

  Evaluating the intentions and character of other people incorrectly, according to one's own traits, especially when they are actually not there.

Inferences: People have an intuitive drive to dislike things that they perceive are bad (whether they are or not) and to challenge them. (A justice principle.)

People's tendency toward the justice principle is fueled by perceived injustices directed at them, but then often re-directed toward other people.

This drive comes from an unconscious assessment of what one learns not to like about one's self, and then displaces to other people, probably to avoid anxiety. 

This learned drive to be critical comes from two possible sources: Explicit (criticism) or implicit (isolation, hardship) evaluations by others; or a natural (really unnatural) absence of some necessity. 

The reason people get in fights is not only that there are two aggressive people that dislike each other, but there are two aggressive people that see their fault of aggressiveness in the other person, and want to attack their own perceived fault; therefore there is a much deeper emotional context and emotional entanglement. 

Hypercritical people are also perpetuating the same dynamic; they are being critical of others as a way of criticizing the perceived fault of being critical by criticizing most often the inappropriate criticism of others (e.g. that person was rude!)

Distraction Displacement: Objectification and Verbalization

A person may often be critical or angry about a particular thing, idea, habit or trait of others. For example, "that person is rude", "that person is grouchy" are two verbalized objects of criticism, the objects being grouchiness and rudeness. Distracting displacement is when a grouchy person is obsessed with rude people and a rude person is obsessed with grouchy people. The person who is obsessed with grouchiness is particularly (and suspiciously) not grouchy, but for some reason always points out grouchy people. The person who is obsessed with rudeness is very polite, but grouchy in the morning. This is not to say that grouchiness and rudeness are dialectically opposed, but that personal misgivings of one's own shortcomings have a tendency to be redirected as verbalized complaints of seemingly unrelated behavior in other people. The criticism is displaced, as with convergent displacement, but it is focused on an unrelated trait, not a similar trait, unlike convergent displacement. Whatever is being criticized is probably more emotionally significant than grouchiness. 

This objectification (in terms of gravitating to a specific idea) and verbalization (in terms of both talking for a purpose that is not entirely small talk (there's a point trying to be expressed that could just as well be expressed in any other context, unlike someone's scarf or the weather)) is an example of where an individual's perceived lack of something, possibly brought about or exaggerated by other's criticism or by lacking some necessity, is redirected to something unrelated. For example, if a person lacks punctuation, he may constantly bring up the notion of poor grammar in other people, as others have told him he has good grammar. There is most likely a reason the person brings up the specific distracting topic, but it is not clear why it is that specific unrelated topic (even to the person who is bringing it up), as it is the result of complex personal circumstance. In effect the weight of a perceived fault (likely unconscious) is compensated for by something else; and since it is socially unacceptable to brag all the time, this personal strength is usually reinvented as another person's fault. This is like a person who thinks his own furniture is awful, but thinks that he owns nice utensils, and then points out how rotten everyone else's utensils are. Abstractly, the emotional strength of a person's conscious or unconscious feelings of lacking something is proportional to the extent they verbalize a seemingly unrelated object. 

The Recalcitrant Mechanism

It was during the respite of Thursday evening that the besieged engineer was able to convey his mechanism to the shop to adjust its recalcitrance. The mechanism had been recalcitrant since its purchase in 1972 and in the decades that followed, the engineer had found difficulties with his other mechanisms, leading him to think that his primary mechanism had a contagious characteristic. 

His suspicions were qualified when the error signal on his computer revealed in its binary fashion what he had long suspected: the contagious characteristic was indeed the culprit for the recalcitrance of his other mechanisms. It was at this moment on Thursday evening that the engineer increased the conviction to over the threshold for taking a mechanism to the shop.

At the shop he was met by a mechanic with a complexion. This mechanic wore a very large hat, so large that his complexion was only visible due to the hat being transparent, as it was not a hat at all, but the shield that is the requirement to metallurgists. The mechanic frowned somberly as he looked at the recalcitrant mechanism and the engineer introduced himself. 

"Are you sure that this mechanism has the primary characteristic of recalcitrance, or could it be the contagiousness that is in fact the primary characteristic?" asked the mechanic shrewdly, and he attempted to rub his chin philosophically but the transparent shield had the unintended purpose of thwarting this affectation. 

"I always thought that the recalcitrance of this mechanism was a more significant characteristic, but now I am not sure," admitted the engineer. 

"And how would you define significant?" asked the mechanic, looking down at the short engineer with an evaluative glance.

"Well, the significance would mean that in the eventuality that the two characteristics are necessarily opposed, the characteristic which perpetuates at the expense of the other is the more significant," replied the engineer cautiously. The mechanic nodded with an intentional distracted and aloof affect, banging his forehead against the shield in the process. The person in front of him was indeed the engineer that he had claimed to be. 

"But can you imagine any situation in which the existential opposition of these two characteristics could occur?" pursued the mechanic. 

"Of recalcitrance and contagiousness?" considered the engineer. This was quite the calculating mechanic. "It is difficult to say, unless we can reduce these characteristics into simpler forms. It would seem more likely that they would exist in combination, as they do in my mechanism. The recalcitrance of the mechanism's contagion leads to the necessary acceptance of the recalcitrant characteristic in the other mechanisms," concluded the engineer.

"Ah, if they are indeed combined, as in the multiplication process, how is it possible to find the relative significance as you purport," challenged the mechanic. 

"The presumption of the multiplicative process is unsubstantiated," countered the engineer warily. "The combination could retain the characteristics as in the addition combination process."

"I have difficulty seeing the relevance in your statement," disparaged the mechanic.

"There is a distinction between the generative properties of the characteristics according to the inherent distinction of combination process. For the multiplicative process, the characteristics will have the following properties: they will occur at the same time and will be together in the generated mechanisms. For the addition process, the characteristics which combine to the original amount by this addition, will appear at different times often in separation in the generated mechanisms caused by the secondary multiplicative processes upon that first amount that was calculated by the addition process," answered the engineer. 

"That is the case of the characteristics," agreed the mechanic, "but how does that further your assertion that one of the characteristics is more significant than the other?" 

"That was your assertion," noted the engineer. 

"Oh so it was," agreed the mechanic, reviewing the conversation in his head. "My apologies," he said with forced sincerity. 

"Nonetheless," continued the engineer graciously, "the question of whether the recalcitrance or the contagiousness of my mechanism is the more significant may be relevant to the successful diagnosis and eventual correction of all my mechanisms." 

"Yes, we can pursue the interaction in another way. Is the absence of the recalcitrance equal to the contagiousness of the mechanism? Or the absence of the contagiousness equal to the recalcitrance of the mechanism?" proposed the mechanic.

"Well it would appear that if there were a trait that reduced recalcitrance that was contagious, it would affect the first mechanism," replied the engineer tiredly; he knew that this was the best mechanic in the city, but he certainly asked many questions that were not obviously diagnostic, which lead to the impression that the mechanic wanted the engineer to do the work of fixing the mechanism, despite the established norms of labor exchange.

"But by definition the recalcitrance would not be affected!" corrected the mechanic, oblivious to the engineer's capitalist apprehension. 

"Yes, it is certainly difficult to tease out the dominant significance of these diverse characteristics," admitted the engineer, testily.

"The multiplicative property of their interaction seems to be the more useful," agreed the mechanic. "The recalcitrance of the mechanism can be adopted by the other mechanisms given the property of contagiousness, but the property of recalcitrance will not be altered by any contagious property," continued the mechanic. 

"Is the recalcitrance of my secondary mechanisms irreversible?" asked the engineer, worriedly.

"Aha, now we have a good question," congratulated the mechanic.

"That was my original question upon arrival at your business!" protested the engineer.

"Oh so it was," agreed the mechanic, reviewing the conversation again in his head. "My apologies," he said with forced sincerity. 

"Well can you reverse the recalcitrance of my secondary mechanisms?" 

"Even if I did, as long as the primary mechanism has the property of contagiousness and recalcitrance, your secondary mechanisms will become recalcitrant again," corrected the mechanic slyly.

"What is your proposal?"

"There are two possibilities: to isolate the primary mechanism away from the other mechanisms to end the contagious property, or to change the property of recalcitrance and retain the contagious property." 

"Won't I have to buy all new secondary mechanisms if I just isolate the primary mechanism?" said the engineer suspiciously.

"Yes, you would," said the mechanic, attempting to rub his chin behind the glass shield. "But I propose the second option: we must change the recalcitrant property of the primary mechanism!" 

"But won't the recalcitrant property of the secondary mechanisms refuse any change?" 

"Not if they become recalcitrant in terms of refusing not to refuse the tertiary characteristic."

"You are suggesting that recalcitrance does not have a self-sustaining generative property," considered the engineer. "Or that it does not have the intellectual capacity to plan its own maintenance."

"Correct on both accounts," said the mechanic. "Recalcitrance is only an unconscious reaction to the environment. In fact it seems that in your case, the contagiousness of the primary mechanism may have preceded the recalcitrance; and led to the development thereof. Then the contagiousness and the recalcitrance spread in combination." 

"So the recalcitrance is an ineffective reaction to the contagiousness," the engineer contemplated aloud.

"Yes, the recalcitrance does nothing to affect the contagiousness, but the outside influences plant and then maintain the recalcitrance," explained the mechanic. "Therefore, to fix your recalcitrant mechanism, we must add the third characteristic: that characteristic which makes the recalcitrant characteristic recalcitrant against being recalcitrant." 

"And what is that characteristic?" asked the engineer. 

"It is the mirror characteristic!" said the mechanic. He deftly added the mirror across from the recalcitrance, which already faced away from the contagiousness and toward the new mirror. Since the contagious mechanism was still in place, the mechanic advised the engineer to take the mechanism home, and let it change the secondary mechanisms on its own.  

The Worst Mystery

The mystery occurred in 1908 when the infamous goose thief had stolen a goose from the nautical area surrounding the beach. The detective to the case had been hired by the private firm to recoup these gooses to their ocean. Indeed, it was a new innovation in the law, that a private firm, instead of the state, would be the motor of justice and to this end they hired a new sort of detective, the scientist, to solve the mystery. 

This scientist was no other than Detective, who went by the pen name Detective to hide his true identity as a scientist cleverly. This Detective began work immediately on the case. Sitting in the indoor barracks of the justice firm, a cup of coffee and pipe in his mouth, he worked on the case. It was a very new theoretical process to solve the mystery as Detective realized that there could only be one perpetrator, while another person might not be the perpetrator. It was this insight that lead to his other momentous discovery, that this perpetrator might have things in common with other perpetrators. So as Detective thought about the average perpetrator, he thought of the characteristics and wrote them down. Next he visited the perpetrators that had already been established in the barracks and viewed their characteristics, and measured each one and put it in the chart.  Then he talked to his co-workers and the janitors and supervisors who were established as non-perpetrators and put them in a chart too. Months went by and the elaborate chart was growing bigger. 

However it was on the Tuesday of the month that Detective realized that many weeks had gone by and he still had not found the goose perpetrator. He used the telephone which had been invented and called the people living on the beach. He invited them all to dinner at the barracks for an interview. 

The next day two hundred people who lived by the beach showed up for the sneaky meal which in fact did not exist as proposed. Instead there was interrogation!

Detective asked the people for their characteristics and compared them to his chart. Some people's characteristics were not like those of the perpetrators and so they were released into the town that was by the beach, from which this sample had arrived. But twenty-seven people remained. Their characteristics were like the perpetrator characteristic. It was at this point that Detective used his most ingenious characteristic construct, that of goose-stealing, on his suspect population. 

Unfortunately, the first twenty-six people scored very lower means than that of the average goose-stealer. But then came the twenty-seventh person. This person's mean across the twenty questions leading to suggestion of goose stealing was higher!

Detective thought he had found the culprit. But now he had to be the prosecutor in the court of law.

The court adjourned. "Is it true that you scored within the first standard deviation above the mean for the construct of goose stealing?" asked Detective.

"Maybe, I do not know the results of that test," admitted the suspect, who was correct, never having been shown these results.

"Let me show the data now," said the detective. "Indeed, you have a score of 75! That is four points higher than the mean! And this is the mean for characteristic of goose stealing!"

"But isn't those numbers should be divided?" asked the defending lawyer. 

"Aha!" But they were!" said Detective, triumphantly. "And it is different by .056!" 

"Oooo that is really close to .05!" admitted the defending lawyer. 

"Well if you've impressed the defending lawyer, then you have impressed me!" said the judge. "The court is now ready to sentence the defendant."

"What?" asked Detective. "But that was not a proof. That just means he is likely a goose perpetrator when compared to the average goose thief, I am nearly 95% certain that this person is more like the average goose thief than the average goose-thief, according to my goose thief characteristic and 5% sure that it was just a fluke!"

"Oh," said the judge. "That will be taken into consideration duly. If this person is only nearly 95% guilty, then he will only have to pay 95% of the price of a new goose that will return to the nautical area near the beach." 

"No, no," said Detective. "I'm 95% sure he's guilty!" corrected Detective.

"Yes, you said that already," said the annoyed judge. "I order the defendant to buy 95% of a new goose."

"Do you mean 95% percent of the actual goose, or is someone going to pay the other 5% for the whole thing?" asked the defendant. 

"Either way," agreed the judge.