alt.physics

This stuff is deeply weird.

Look at the first page, where the author finds the period of a simple pendulum. He deprecates the usual textbook analysis, which involves an approximation, sin x ≈ x, that's only valid for small displacement. He "provides an analysis using a system circle as a system clock", and gets the same answer as the usual approximation -- but his is not an approximation or restricted to small angles. "If one now tests this equation by setting the initial displacement angle to both small and large angles, then one sees that the equation still holds. That is, the period (T) is independent of the initial displacement angle."

responsible and conventional

(Spawned from friends' thought-provoking entries, but I think it's come detached.)

What I see is people puzzled by the blurring together of responsibility with conventionality. Say responsibility is honoring obligations, and conventionality is taking on obligations by default. Why the temptation to blur them?

And there is a temptation. I do it myself, not when I'm thinking explicitly but when I hear one and think a shade of the other. Maybe it's that the conventional ideal includes responsibility. Conventional implies responsible, not vice versa, but we know the hardwired human logical system isn't too bright about implicative direction.

To come at it another way, the exemplar for both responsible and conventional is maybe the same guy, fortysomething white male working hard to support his car payments and his Caribbean cruise once a year and his N kids. Ugly to think, yes, and maybe you're free of it: who is the typical (not a specific) responsible person? Me, I can come up with better ones, but the truth is they aren't my preconscious thought.

You why I think it is for me, I think it's that I am too conventional. I think part of the conventional system is the idea that you can't really be responsible without being conventional, that they're equivalent.

They're not, and they're further than orthogonal. Honoring obligations is not the same as fulfilling them. On the one hand, it's about the spirit in which you fulfil them, and on the other, to honor an obligation may mean not to take it on. Conventional obligations are at odds with responsibility.

They're not equivalent, and I can tell myself that as often as I like.