Yadkin Junction: The Curve to Tie into the Northbound Mainline

Here is an attachment showing Yadkin Junction.  The building to the right in the photo above is the old freight depot, which sits squarely inside the "Y" of Yadkin Junction, as can be seen on the attachment.

Since the conventions of naming streets and rail lines and interstate highways are simply that--conventions--perhaps it might hep to know that the shot above was made shooting almost due east.

This is all very problematic in Salisbury, since the central grid of streets is offset about 45 degrees from the points of the compass (not to mention true north, free of magnetic declination errors). 

That is, "North Main" and "North Lee" actually run to the northeast, and north I-85 runs approximately northeast as well--and sometimes due east, but only rarely due north.

For those who are used to orienting themselves by compass headings (or even true north by the stars) rather than by landmarks and naming conventions, such discrepancies can be a bit confusing at times.  As for those who do not care about compass headings (much less true north), they are always confused but never know it until they are lost. 

I'm sorry for the editorial, but I am constantly having to explain to Salisbury residents that "north" on street signs really means "northeast" in central Salisbury--and I usually get a very blank look.  Oh, well.  Not too many people orient themselves by the compass or by the stars, sun, and moon anymore.  When in doubt, they just whip out the old GPS.

God bless them--and God help them.  If one cannot navigate in very small urban centers, what is one going to do in the wilderness?  Well, the answer is very simple: most people never go into the wilderness, and so perhaps it does not matter too much.  For those of us who do, it matters a heck of a lot.  For sea kayakers (for whom there are NO landmarks), the compass and the stars and sun and moon are all we have.  There is no wilderness like ocean wilderness, but I digress even more about one of my pet peeves: we've gotten so "civilized" that we tend to let social conventions be our guide--in all spheres of our lives. 

--Lannie

Tulsa's major streets run North-South and East-West, spaced at one-mile intervals, East-West streets numbered such that Eleventh is one mile from First, etc.  North-South streets are sometimes given the names of cities, street names progressing alphabetically, streets west of Main having names of western cites, and streets east of Main having names of eastern cities. (Denver, Cheyenne, Boulder Main, Boston, Cincinnati, Detroit).  Ordered.

Except downtown, where everything is rotated 45 degrees to accommodate the railroad tracks.

Another great picture.  PN is dead at the moment, or my pictures are dull.  Have a look if you get a chance.  I could use some encouragement.  best, jamie

--Lannie

Cool!  Did I tell you that I got lost there once?  (Actually, I in the U-Haul and BG and kids in the car got separated somehow because of a mix-up of communications--not because we don't know our georgraphy.  We were headed for Wichita Falls, TX.)

Ah, yes, the good old days--about to see the Wichita Mtns. looming up in front of me for the first time the next morning (leaving out of OKC) as we traveled on down into SW OKLAHOMA!  What a cool surprise!

Great state.  Whatever took you to England?  (Not that I have a single bad thing to say about England--and I'm Irish-American.)

--Lannie

Hi Lannie,

Nice shot !o

I enjoy this image as much as I enjoy your commentary.

Do not feel too frustrated. In my rural township, there are many streets in different locations, all having the same. It is a bit crazy, as even some GPS units have a difficult time with such a layout.

I suggested to one official that all the streets should be simple numbers, starting with 0 to whatever.

Of course, someone would start using negative numbers and the mess would continue !

Best Regards,  Mike

Love this photo. I haven't looked at the maps you have supplied but this photo looks as if the tracks are about to enter a small mid-western town. I can almost feel it. (and again - just aiming the camera up a bit to include more sky would probably have given the photo even more impact).

academia, you know?  i moved around a lot.  i love it here.  best, jamie

Thanks to everyone.

Jamie, are you a chemist, a physicist, or what?

--Lannie

No kidding.  All my physicist friends think that's pretty funny.  

I study the senses from a physical standpoint.  A crazy German called Fechner invented psychophysics over 100 years ago.  He was ill, in a delirious coma for a couple of weeks.  He woke up and had realised that you could consider differences in light or sound energy just big enough to see or hear - "Just-Noticeable Differences."  He reasoned that all energy differences that are just noticeable must induce perceptual sensations of the same tiny magnitude (brightness or loudness or whatever).  You could add these tiny differences up to measure perceptual magnitude quantitatively.  

This fantastic realisation began my field.  The realisation was was wrong, though.  One of the best paper titles I've ever heard is, "To honor Fechner and Repeal his Law," by S.S. Stevens.  Right up there with, "What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain."  I'm not working in psychophysics at the moment, but I may go back to it.  Thanks Lannie.  best, jamie

Actually, that sounds positively fascinating, Jamie.  Whitehead said that "consciousness is an emergent property of physical processes," and exactly how mind and body are connected is the ultimate question, one belonging to both physics and metaphysics.   We can only speculate about the metaphysical questions, but the purely physical side of it would be absolute wondrous to understand more fully.  I envy you.

--Lannie

(We use the thing to do the stuff.)

I think so.  Dualism is pretty weak from where I stand, but it's one of the many ideas that almost everyone repudiates but many secretly harbour, often without even realising.

I can't say too much.  My scientific discipline was invented by a religious fanatic in a feverish dream.  I think knowing how to do science in general is much harder than knowing how to approach a specific field.  I think lots of people would disagree, but I don't think they understand the harder thing.  best, j

Maybe, Jamie, but trying to operationalize the variables you want to measure in a specific field such as yours is unique to that field, if only (in this case) because the field is so unique.  Even knowing how to formulate a hypothesis about the mind-body problem is extraordinarily difficult, which is why we as scientists tend to shove all that aside and say that it is in the realm of metaphysics, totally beyond any possibility of being falsified by new empirical data.  I would not know how or where to start formulating a hypothesis in your area, and yet I also resist the notion that it is all simply a matter of clarifying language, as Wittgenstein and Ayer, et al. seemed to be saying. 

Science in practice is a mess, in any case, in the sense that we often say that the method is largely inductive, when in fact induction and deduction are all mixed up together.  Even the final stage of refutation of a hypothesis is deductive: If Theory A, then B.  Not-B.  Therefore Not-A.

I would be interested in seeing precisely what kinds of things you can operationalize in your discipline.  What can be measured?  Readings from electrodes planted in the brain, etc., or what?  Even the name of the field is problematic, given that psyche can mean either "mind" or "soul"--and one doesn't have to make firm assumptions about the nature of "soul" in order to proceed.  Even so, the connotations (at least) of a science of the soul v. a science of the mind are vastly different.

As for the problems with dualism, I will grant that there are problems--from the point of view of scientific verification or dis-verification.  Even so, the problems with materialist monism are substantial as well.  Fortunately, whatever you are trying to operationalize and  measure surely does not require you to solve the metaphysical problem--either a priori or a posteriori.

In 1972, I decided that I was going to figure out my own theory of the psychology of morals, an equally difficult sub-field that spans metaphysics and epistemology--and of course ethics as well.  A year and some  months later, I had a stack of notebooks (of my own writings) that was at least a couple of feet high.  I wound up trashing all but a very few pages, and I was a wreck, a failure with virtually nothing to show for my efforts but a propensity toward panic attacks.  I can only tell anyone what I threw out as obviously false.  I cannot remember anything that I kept that I knew to be true.  Then again, science does proceed overwhelmingly negatively, I believe.  Perhaps that I was able to conclude anything at all is the remarkable thing.  Another side of me says that, even in the realm of pure logic, it is not clear what we are trying to prove or disprove.

I think that setting the problem is always the difficult thing.  One spends one's life trying to figure out the questions.  The answers?  Ha!  Like Socrates, as I approach the end of my life I can only conclude that I know nothing.

I would not let anyone lightly disparage your field because of its beginnings.  Chemistry with phlogiston, cosmology with Ptolemy, etc. show that science begins with errors--gross errors.  Where is your discipline now, and how did it get where it is?  These would be interesting to know.  Please consider writing a book on it from a scientific rather than a purely philosophical perspective.  We have, after all, come quite a ways since epilepsy was explained as demon possession.  Some light has been shed along with the ink and the blood.

I do find it sobering to reflect upon the fact that if there is a God, all of the things that we are trying to discover already exist in the mind of God.  So. . . precisely what are we trying to figure out, and why?

--Lannie

Where I was coming from:  The best people in my field often have engineering backgrounds.  Most of us wish we knew more math.  My colleagues often cling to ideas that are demonstrably not merely wrong, but wholeheartedly foolish.

Science is harder to do well than most people realise.  It's pretty zen, when it's done well.  A scientist should wake up each morning, metaphorically speaking, elated that everything he or she believes might be proven wrong that day.  That's a tall order for egomaniac humans.  Compared to that, operationalising anything is small potatoes.

Deduction.  I think it's a kind of psychological artefact.  It's never useful in the real world.  You know, "All cats have four legs," etc.  But in fact, all cats only have four legs if you stay in a kind of platonic world.

The word, "Know," to me is a similar sort of artefact.  "Know" seems to mean to believe an idea that is factual.  That's wrong though.  In practice, if you discover that something you know is actually wrong, you might stop knowing it at that moment, but you don't retroactively stop knowing it completely.  Perhaps "Know" means to believe an idea and consider its veracity beyond doubt.  In practice, that has to be wrong as well because people are often not surprised when something they knew turns out to be wrong.  So I think "Know" means to believe an idea and to want to convince others that it is true.  What a silly word!  best, j

Robert Nozick speaks of "committing philosophy" and using philosophy to coerce others into thinking as we do.  Thus do we speak of "a forceful argument," etc. A really "powerful" argument is one that totally "destroys" the philosophical adversary's position, etc. 

I like to read Nozick, since he makes me laugh while reading philosophy.  No other philosopher can do that to me--or for me.

Yes, we want confirmatory evidence, it seems.  We should take jackhammers to our own pet theories, whether philosophical or scientific.  Instead, we too often want to try to justify ourselves through our theories: "See!  I was right all along!"

Ah, induction and deduction.  In my course on Philosophy of Social Science we get into that somewhat.  Granted that Aristotelian syllogistic logic has its limitations, actual logic in use uses deduction all the time.  Yet, yet, I understand that the induction-deduction distinction is the artefact, our own primitive creation for trying to understand our own reasoning.

--Lannie

I think syllogisms are rarely more than theoretical entities, because premises are never really certain, except in theoretical domains.  Most cats have four legs.  Just most.  Vision scientists seem to like this idea - a well-known site giving facts about the visual system specifies as two the modal number of eyes on a human.

Mathematics may not seem to be a theoretical domain, but it is a set of theoretical items, numbers, and actions to operate on them.  It corresponds closely to real life, but it is still theoretical, I believe.  You were kind not to destroy me utterly.  I still maintain that the word, "Know," is useless in precise communication.  Thanks.  best, j

Now, there is a great phrase if ever I heard one.  That has got to be a Photo.net classic.  I am wondering what the range might be on human eyes--from 0 to 2, from 0 to 3, etc.  (No negative numbers allowed?  Shame.)

Well, I have no knowledge about logic except for having taken Advanced Symbolic Logic with J.J. Zeman in grad school way, way back in the early 70s, and he was, I admit, more into the philosophy of mathematics than anything else--and nothing that he said or suggested ever implied that math and logic are other than deductive theoretical constructs.  So I guess you are right.  Yet, even in math there is that uncanny way that the calculus works so well in analyses of velocity, acceleration, etc.: the theoretical world mapping so well onto the physical world.  It still astounds me.  And let's not forget the area under a curve in integral calculus.  Zounds.  Why does that work?

I do remember teaching logic once at the introductory level in which we did give a lot of emphasis to syllogistic logic, and it was fascinating to think about Aristotle exploring or creating (take your pick) such a system so very long ago.  There was a lot more to it than I ever imagined--and that is only common syllogistic logic, nothing very difficult.  I also had reason more than once that semester to think about the very things that you are talking about, but I never came to any firm conclusions. That math and logic are deductive constructs, I do not doubt, but. . . .

My "but" comes from considering the logical operators, especially the capacity to use the conditional even in over-the-backyard-fence gossip, not merely in theoretical matters.  "If John is seeing Sally, and he is married to Sue, then. . . ." 

So I don't know either.  It is all a great mystery to me.

Now would be a good time to reread Gibbs on free energy. . . out of despair.  (Can thermo save us?  Did they simply use "cut and paste" to write the P. Chem. books??  It never held together for me.  Never will, I fear.  Logic be damned.)

I do think that it is fascinating that Einstein in his 1905 article on electrodynamics very quickly got around to saying, "If we postulate that the speed of light is constant. . . ."  Yes, it was theory (and why he ever saw that as a fruitful way to proceed is beyond me--and yet look at what it yielded), but look at not only the theoretical but also the practical implications.  I wish that I had the math to read the General Theory, but the Special Theory is it for me.  I have come up against the limitations of my own competency.  (Well, it was mostly algebra, as I recall, with a few partial derivatives, if I am not mistaken--not really difficult, but astonishing, although the part with the partial derivatives never quite made sense to me.  (Cut me a little slack here.)  I wish that Asimov or someone had told me that the speed of light was not only something specific measured by Michaelson and Morley, but also an assumption, a postulate, in Einstein's entire theoretical schema.  I had to read Einstein himself--and it hit me between the eyes, especially in light of his famous statement that imagination is more important than intelligence, etc.

The above are all factoids about my own philosophical grapplings with pure theory, and I cannot begin to figure it out.  As you can see, my delvings do not go very deep, although the questions are deep enough.

In your field, for example, what is the physiological correlate to "imagination"?  Is there a random number generator in the brain somewhere?  (I am not being facetious.)

If you get it figured out, Jamie, let me know.  I am a professional dilettante and have not thought a lot of things through that yet continue to fascinate me.

From whence came the thought that I am having this instant?

(This will surely teach me not to get into a conversation with a psychophysicist about things about which I have never fully understood one darned thing.  Um, by the way. . . is that "psychophysicist" or "psycho physicist"?  It is all rather maddening, in any case.)

--Lannie

The Wason Card-Sorting Test:  Your job as the subject is to decide whether a rule has been upheld or broken.  There are four cards on the table in front of you.  You are told that each card has a number on one side and a letter on the other.  You see only one side of each card.  You are to turn over only the cards necessary to validate the rule.  On the four cards, you see:  "A," "B," "1," and "2."  The rule is, "If there is a vowel on one side, then there is an odd number on the other side.  Very few students get this right.  Try it.

Now, let's try again, but the cards have beverages being consumed by some individuals on one side and the ages of the corresponding individuals on the other.  On the four cards you see, "Coke," "Beer," "18," and "27."  The rule is, "If an individual is drinking alcohol, then the individual must be at least 21 years old."  All the students get this right.  Formally, it is exactly the same question.  Why is one so hard and one so easy?

Random numbers and psychoanalysis:  Ask a group of people to write down a random number.  Then ask them to free-associate to that number for precisely one minute.  Then have them trade numbers with another person.  Then ask them to free-associate to the other person's random number for one minute.  The number of associations is always much larger for one's own number.  You can also trade numbers and then do your own.  The result is the same.  Humans cannot in this sense generate random numbers.  best, j

p.s.:  I started requesting ratings for the da Vinci portraits, as you suggested.  Pretty grim.  Could use some help there.  j