A Family Tree of all Mankind - part 2

     So this project begins egocentrically perhaps, with myself in the present (I did say I included my wife's ancestors too, but for simplicity let's ignore that for now). And I list my 2 parents, and then 4 grandparents, and then 8 great-grandparents etc.. and so on and so forth, as far back as I am able to go along all possible lines. For clarity let me throw up a quick diagram to show the trunk of the tree - the focal point of the whole project:

     To be pedantic about it, the above tree isn't the best example, because each generation there is shown circularly outward from the trunk. A better way to envision the tree is to get each generation lined up with itself horizontally like so:

      That's more like it. And in that flat-topped-tree style, here's what my actual data looks like out to four generations:

 

   

      So let's break out some math because we're going to need it. If you continue building up a tree in this manner, it doesn't take very long before it gets BIG. It's growth is exponential with the base of 2. One generation back you have 2^1 = 2 ancestors. Two generations back you have 2^2 = 4 ancestors. Three generations back you have 2^3 = 8 ancestors. etc... So n generations back you will have 2^n ancestors. (Note: This is valid for zero generations too because 2^0 = 1. Isn't math neat?) This of course is true only if all the ancestors are known and entered into the tree. Obviously, the further back in time you go, the less "complete" your ancestor tree will be. So my tree grows less slowly than 2^n, and you might say 2^n is an upper bound. But still it explodes pretty rapidly. This looks like a good place to link the Chapter One portion of the book I printed out back in 2009. I worked so hard to make it look neat and perfect back then, but now since I've done more research and developed the tree further, it's not as complete as my current version... which I am unable to provide at this time for technical reasons. But it's now roughly twice as big, and terminates in 13 gateway ancestors that begin my Chapter 2 - Middle Ages. This Chapter one linked here terminates in only 4 "gateway ancestors" that I had known at the time. Note: I'm now up to 13 gateway ancestors which are shown at the bottom of my roadmap/diagram. Obviously my Chapter 2 here from 2009 is outdated also, but I'm not going to make another pdf of it. There's nothing fundamentally important or unique about the gateway ancestors in the real world. Their selection is totally dependent upon the topology of my tree based on the particular nodes and connections within it. They are the easiest way that I know, how to cut or sever the tree between chapters one and two.

Continued on page 3.

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A Family Tree of all Mankind - part 1

What does the family tree of all of humanity look like?

      This series of posts is dedicated to displaying my family tree that I've researched and compiled over the course of about 10 years. I began roughly in 2002, and worked on this project on and off until 2009 when I reached a good stopping point and attempted to print out a book. But soon I discovered more ancestors and began adding them in again, and I also got married and started adding in my wife's ancestors too, so by 2012 my tree had grown about twice as big. Anything I had previously printed out - all the pretty looking pdfs, trees, and charts etc. were already outdated. My book printing ambitions didn't work out so well anyway. I got the first chapter out, and some of the smaller last chapters out, but I got hung up on the massive lump in the middle. You see the problem is, that this tree is so ridiculously massively huge and complex, that working with it seriously borders along insanity. After literal reams of paper and ink I finally realized that it doesn't make sense to strive to produce a physically printed-out copy of the tree in any form, be it book, or chart or any two dimensional format conceivable. The best way for it to be displayed is on the internet within a hyperlinked network. Which I DID do once, on a different website which subsequently crashed. And it took such a ridiculous amount of time to create, that for technical reasons that no one wants to hear, it is not currently available. Most of this text in these blogs here are copied from my other website, so I apologize for any links that are still dead. But even without the actual interactive tree, I still recommend anyone to keep reading this dialogue to understand it. There are insights to be gleaned here that I know nearly everyone misunderstands about evolution and ancestry.

      First, let me tell you about what this project looks like. This tree in its entirety is STRICTLY AN ASCENDING TREE, as opposed to a descending one. Most people think of a family tree as starting from some individual in the past and mapping out his or her descendants. That is a descending tree, and indeed most family trees are of the descending genre, or maybe a combination of both. But this one is an ascending tree. I'm going to say it again, because I cannot stress the importance of this enough. My family tree is an ASCENDING tree ONLY. And as such, EVERY person herein named is a direct ancestor with a direct and complete unbroken line all the way to myself in the present. That means they are a great^n-grandfather or a great^n-grandmother directly. And anyone who does not meet the criteria of being a direct ancestor is omitted. If a family relation is known but they are an uncle, aunt, cousin, or sibling, they are not incuded (unless they are also an ancestor). This is necessary because I can only devote so much time to this project, and I have to draw the line somewhere. In addition to the ancestors' names, this tree also contains info (if it is known) for the date of birth, location of birth, date of marriage, location of marriage, date of death, location of death, and one other data entry called "aka". There are no photos or other media. No history nor stories are given about the lives of the individuals - just the bare bones here. I used the Family Tree Maker 2005 software to compile it all, but it is displayed here as an archive of HTML pages with a network of links, produced via a GEDCOM. Some statistics of the project:

Number of different unique individuals: 24,523. (ancestors only)
Total number of marriages: 9,126.
Average lifespan: 55 years, 7 months.
Longest line of generations: 186.
Average time in between generations: 28.5 years.
Earliest listed ancestors: Adam and Eve.
Total number of different surnames: 8,245.
Amount of skepticism you probably have right now: A lot.

Family Tree Maker 2005 only allows me to work with a maximum of 99 generations at a time. And it irritatingly also will not handle dates prior to 100 AD, so the "date" entries for those earlier times are found in the Location field instead.

Here (and also below) is a rough road-map sketch to help guide you around a bit (This will be useful to "see" what the tree looks like as a whole, but I understand it's a bit overwhelming. I will explain this better as we go). Also you may download my master-index of all named ancestors in a Microsoft word .rtf format to help navigate if you like (This will not at all be useful anymore, since the interactive tree isn't here).

Follow along with me in this dialogue and I'll take you on a tour of the whole project, while providing potentially paradigm challenging insights and occasionally controversial commentary!

Continued on page 2.

page 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 page

Anatomy of a science tattoo

Anatomy of a science tattoo.

"Is it a satellite," gets commonly asked. Nope. “What does it mean?” The short answer is a bunch of science stuff that I think is very interesting, and has some deeper meaning for me.

And the long answer is:

Starting at the top-left is the golden ratio phi (φ) which is a constant of nature. We know this number out to about a baJillion decimal places because it’s exactly equal to:

Many things in the natural world as well as the artificial man-made world utilize this number at a fundamental level. It's the basis of the Fibonacci sequence which goes like 1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34 etc.... where each number is obtained by adding the two numbers before it. Phi is how plants 'know' when to branch and when not to branch. It's how they 'know' where to grow leaves angularly to maximize sunlight exposure. Sunflowers and pinecones use phi to arrange their seeds in the most perfectly efficient spiral arrangement possible using two adjacent Fibonacci numbers. The number of petals in many plants is a Fibonacci number. Many shelled sea creatures like the nautilus grow in spirals proportional to 1.618. Phi has been with us for a very long time - all the way back to the beginning of life's evolutionary history. Phi might be the reason we have 5 fingers on each hand and foot, and is therefore the reason humans locked in to counting with base 10 in the first place. You have 1 bone in the upper arm (humerus) which splits into 2 bones (radius and ulna) in the forearm which splits into 3 wrist bones, which splits into 5 fingers: 1,2,3,5 - the Fibonacci series at work. The same thing occurs also in the legs - the 1 thigh bone (femur) splits into 2 bones (tibia and fibula) which split into 3 ankle bones which splits into 5 more ankle bones (for a total of 8 ankle bones) which continue as 5 digits out to the toes. Phi is also the ratio of the lengths of all these bones. The Fibonacci series is related to phi because taking any two adjacent numbers in the series approximates the constant. In other words, the series is phi's closest whole number approximation. It seems that nature prefers to use the constant exactly, but where it is constrained to using only whole numbers, the Fibonacci series suffices as the next best thing. Life discovered the utility of this 'most-efficient’ number of nature and exploited it, and that's what it represents here in this context - efficiency. Where some look at phi and see intelligent design, others see the elegant beauty of nature, as selection pressures converge upon this mysterious attractor in many different domains. Naturally there is much controversy here. Beware of pseudo-sciences like astrology that have put a nasty unfortunate stain on phi and diluted its truth and value.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio

At the bottom-left is another constant of nature - the coupling constant aka fine structure constant alpha (α), which in base 10 reads 137.035999etc... This number has to be observed and measured, so we currently know only about ten significant figures for it. It is dimensionless and unitless, so it will be observed as the same number everywhere in the Universe, regardless of the system of measurement being used or how that system emerged. Alpha determines the strength of interaction between electrons and photons. It can be defined in terms of other fundamental constants of nature in the nearby expression to the right:

Where e is the electric charge, pi(π) is 3.1416…, ε₀ is the permittivity of free space, ħ is Planck’s constant, and c is the speed of light. The dimensions of these quantities cancel each other out leaving only a number, and if we were to ever encounter other intelligent life in the Universe, this is a number we could agree upon despite our profound differences. Base 10 is an arbitrary anthropocentric system, whereas binary would be a more ubiquitous universal language. This could be a likely message to communicate throughout the Universe that would signal intelligent life.

To quote the late physicist Richard Feynman about alpha, 

"There is a most profound and beautiful question associated with the observed coupling constant, e - the amplitude for a real electron to emit or absorb a real photon. It is a simple number that has been experimentally determined to be close to 0.08542455. (My physicist friends won't recognize this number, because they like to remember it as the inverse of its square: about 137.036 with an uncertainty of about 2 in the last decimal place. It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than fifty years ago, and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it.) Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to pi or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It's one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the "hand of God" wrote that number, and "we don't know how He pushed his pencil." We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to measure this number very accurately, but we don't know what kind of dance to do on the computer to make this number come out, without putting it in secretly!"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-structure_constant

At the left-middle is the Euler-Lagrange equation. In school, this struck me as a beautiful and elegant equation - a master equation with which to derive other equations. It's now been elevated to a status even more fundamental than Newtonian mechanics. In layman's terms it could be described as the principle of least action. The Lagrange equation seems to suggest the physical Universe operates according to laws of nature based on a principle of economy. Of all the possible pathways a particle or a phenomena could take, the path they actually DO take in reality, is always a minima (or interestingly, a maxima) relating to this equation. It applies from the smallest scale of Quantum Mechanics to the largest scale of General Relativity. Where we dwell at the macroscopic level in between, this equation is useful for solving problems in a manner that bypasses causality and forces, and yields equations of motion derived from energies alone.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler%E2%80%93Lagrange_equation

 

The overall shape of the whole tattoo design is the molecule dopamine. Dopamine is related to evolution's reward mechanism in the brain, and is in part responsible for everything that feels good or is good. Tasty bacon or sugar taste good because dopamine in the brain is released. Sex or a feeling of well-being, or a sense of accomplishment all feel good because of dopamine. Dopamine takes part in our pleasures and our desires, but it also comes with a great danger of being abused. Illegal drugs like heroin or meth exploit dopamine and are addicting. More trivial drugs like smoking or playing games are addicting to a lesser extent. Animals being tested in the lab that were given the power to push a lever and release dopamine into certain parts of their brains preferred doing so to any other activity including eating. It felt so good, they forgot to eat and starved to death. I get pleasure out of contemplating some of the other ideas in this design, and I desire to understand them better, which is why I chose the dopamine molecule. The brain is a complex chemical place though, and dopamine doesn’t take credit alone for all these powerful things. In this context it represents everything that feels good and keeps us going, and also the maxim 'everything in moderation'. I believe that in the future as humans unlock the secrets of the brain, our self-discipline to not pull on our own dopamine levers will be critically important at best, and an existential risk at worse.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dopamine

The O's in front of the H's that would otherwise mean oxygen, are for fusion, which I think is one of the most important things humans are inventing right now. Fusion energy is arguably the second most important thing man will create - the first thing being the singularity in the back-middle. The Sun burns hot with nuclear fusion, and humans most definitely want to harness it to bootstrap our peak-oil civilization into a fusion energy civilization if we wish to continue the comfortable exponential growth we are all accustomed to.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER

The h+ in the middle is the symbol for the futuristic ideology Transhumanism. For me this represents continually improving myself. H is for humanity, and Plus is for improving – both physically and mentally, biologically and artificially. The merger of man and machine is already well underway. I already outsource some of my memory to say, my cell phone contacts list, or my computer hard drive. Much of my knowledge is outsourced to ‘the cloud’ of Wikipedia and all I need know is the procedure of how to access it. My calculator is sitting next to me and isn’t ‘inside’ me yet, but Man as he exists today is not the final product of evolution, in spite of those who would anthropocentrically wish to believe that he is. Technological evolution is just an extension of biological evolution and Man is currently inventing and creating his successor now.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhumanism

The Singularity in the background is in regards to the technological singularity, not the black-hole type of singularity, although those are interesting too. There is an analogy between the two, however – Just as an event horizon surrounds a black hole and what is inside cannot be observed, so too we cannot predict what lies behind the future’s event horizon of artificial intelligence. Similar to how a housecat lacks the comprehension of its master’s actions, we today cannot comprehend the things we would know if we had the improved cognitive hardware to know the things we would know if we had the better hardware etc…. If we are really lucky, a utopian Kurzweilian Merger awaits, or if we are unlucky perhaps the Fermi Paradox will filter us out. Either way, our biological kluges of brains, evolved as they are with multiple imperfect systems cobbled together, cannot yet read this next chapter of punctuated equilibrium.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularitarianism

The S at the bottom is the symbol for Entropy.

Entropy is one of the most fundamentally important elegant truths in the Universe. It’s closely intertwined with energy and information, and somehow I suspect it may be the basis for the meaning of life. Life in our corner of the Universe overcame entropy all the way from supernova to singularity in ~4.5 billion years. Maybe it was lucky, or maybe it was inevitable. I don’t know, but I hope the singularity will someday tell me. In the meantime, I believe entropy is the reason we all get up every day and go work.  

The DNA strand at the bottom-right… is a DNA strand.

The NH2 at the top-right is to make it less ambiguous that the whole overall structure is the dopamine molecule.

The number on the right is hex ascii code that reads “Science For Life.”

So it would seem I’m THAT guy... the one that gets a tattoo that says Science For Life. lol.

First Blog - Purpose

Welcome,

The purpose of this blog is to share some ideas I've had; to get them out there into the blogosphere where memes are propagated around selectively in this new medium of communication called the internet where memetic evolution is occuring at an exponential pace.

The subject of the blogs could be anything - whatever it is I happen to be excited about at the time. More than likely they will be in the domain of science or philosophy or religion or economics - Things that I think are important or interesting.

What this blog will not be about is myself and my personal day to day activities, because let's just be honest with ourselves - Who really cares, right?

Unless, of course, I change my mind in the future.


Well that's all for now,
Happy reading!