Monthly Archives: April 2019

Projects

For a personal project, I’ve recently invested in the STEP Mastery Program, from https://learndobecome/com. I’m tired of living a life of chaos surrounded by piles of debris from incomplete projects, so I’m spending a lot of time organizing my time, projects, and stuff. There’s a lot of sorting and throwing away going on; the most urgent batch may continue for another week or so. I’m also enrolled in several free courses from Udacity; these include version control using Git; HTML and CSS; Android (programming) Basics, and also a Java programming course from Udemy. I’ve decided that it’s time to upgrade and update the Sapience Web site: I’m not quite sure exactly how I’m going to do that, but I intend it to be more graphic and more interactive. I also intend to develop a smart phone app, or maybe a suite of them, using Android and IOS. The working title is “Sapience Learning Laboratory”.

I’m continuing with the development and linking of pages of the Sapience Knowledge Base and I have almost a year’s worth of work I haven’t yet published and posted to the the web. I’ve decided to shift the focus to the lower end, concentrating on science and beginning with physics, mechanics, and particle mechanics. Most of that is going to be reserved for a future update.

That should keep me busy and out of trouble, or perhaps in it.

Drowning

Not much progress in building links for the knowledge base. Instead, I have been pushing my independent studies of computer science and technology, and learning how to organize my activity and stuff.

Mechanics

I have taken physical and natural science, the study of the natural world around us, as the most basic component of human knowledge. With my recent decision to focus on the simpler end rather than historical end comes a decision to focus most particularly on physics, and within physics, on mechanics, and specifically particle mechanics. The first thing to I want to do is to concentrate on the mathematical description of time and space. I don’t have any deep philosophical insight into the description of time: I just use a number of time units from an arbitrary beginning, which will depend on the context of the problem. As I develop more applications, this will become a more complex topic. As far as space, I am using three types: Linear, or one-dimensional space; planar or two dimensional space; and three dimensional space. There are more complex variants of these, but I will also defer this for a later time. Although time and space are considered mathematically continuous, I can only represent them approximately. For beginning applications, a small number of divisions will be sufficient.
The next task is to describe particle motion. I consider a particle to consider a mass point, which is an idealization and is only represented approximately. Motion is the association of positions in space with instants of time, and there are various types and cases of motion. I am still working on my programming skills to represent these in a computer program, but I am getting close.

Developing

I had the notion that my studies of history are going much too slowly to be useful. I want to start making a commercial product. Given that smart phones are becoming so common and useful and applications are becoming so common, I want to go back to the low-level science end and begin programming scientific applications in what I will be calling the Sapience Learning Laboratory.
When I did a search on Android development, the first thing that came up was Udacity. This has numerous free courses that I can used to update and improve my various skills.

As I work through the knowledge base, there is a great deal of emphasis on physics. Many topics use this, at least indirectly. The most basic, elementary topic is particle mechanics. In order to work with particle mechanics, I need the concepts of time and space. I am taking a purely mathematical approach. Although space in reality seems to be infinite, unbounded, and continuous, for practical, computational purposes, I am dealing with small, discrete, bounded spaces. As I enlarge these in the process of development, they will begin to approximate reality. There are linear or one dimensional spaces, planar or two-dimensional spaces, and solid or three-dimensional spaces. I am also including time as if it were a space. This should get me started.