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- 071-586 2192/ 1 Southbury, Boundary Road, London NW8
- NB: His book not in Sunbury library system
[1] IEE to contact him
[2] First letter to Rantzen
[3] Note on his first reply
[4] Reminder letter to him
[5] Notes on meeting Tue 11th June 1991
5.1 Printout of notes I took along with me
5.2 His introductory speech
5.3 Questions and his replies
5.4 A few extra comments
[6] Summary: Some of his Claimed Results [from his Green-back File MS]
[7] Reply I sent to him, criticising 'Pattern Recognition in Man and his Environment', and the notes the reply was based on
[8] His reply, 18 June 91 wanting further discussion
[9] My reply: Tue 25 Jun, 1991
[10] His reply: 14th August
[11] My reply: 28th August
[12] Second meeting: Wed 4 Sep, 1991
[13] Comments by others: Catt, Deans
[14] The End?/ Fellow 'Suppressee': Roy Jennings
[15] Letter to Royal Statistical Society
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[1] IEE on 071-240-1871. [Not in phone book!; same Address as Institute of Electronic and Radio Engineers] will forward letter: cross-checked age; 88.
- Letter to IEE Membership Dept, Savoy Place, LONDON WC2 0BL, 6 Dec 1990:
A few days ago I phoned you - i.e. IEE membership department - to confirm that Mr H B Rantzen was still a member, and that you would be willing to forward a letter to him. I enclose my letter - in a stamped envelope; I'd be very grateful for you forwarding it. Thanks.
Yours sincerely, Rae West.
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[2] - Letter to H B Rantzen Esq, c/o IEE, Savoy Place, WC2 0BL, 6th December 1990
Dear Mr Rantzen,
First of all, I apologise for writing to you, via the IEE, out of the blue like this. For a long time I've owned a copy of your book 'Uncertainty - in Nature and Communication' [my copy published 1968, by Hutchinson]. Part of my background was in statistics, and I found the subject interesting, but tantalising, in the sense that I wasn't completely happy about the underlying theoretical underpinnings, and it seemed to me you shared this feeling.
I was particularly taken by some of your results for the physical world, for example your deduction of stability being implicit in a year of 365.3 revolutions; your tropopause calculations and the connection with 37.5 degrees latitude; and the connection of the annual temperature cycle and the suggestion that 1/4 of 22 feet, i.e. 5'8", represented an important boundary.
A few things puzzled me, though, for example:
1. In your normalised Gaussian distribution, how were the horizontal limits,
and the magnitude, of the rectangular distribution; fixed?
2. In some of the examples, it wasn't clear to me what the x-axis measured.
3. Some quoted evidence, e.g. Fletcher & Galt on speech, didn't seem to make it clear what 'articulation' vs 'frequency' mean.
And I wondered if, in the rather depressingly long time that's elapsed since the publication of your book,
1. Evidence about other planets in the solar system has yielded any similar or confirming results?
2. Possibly there are extensions to other fields: Brownian motion, or other aspects of the biology of small creatures? Perhaps economics, or social phenomena involving information?
3. Have newer digital communications altered any of your conclusions?
I've made this letter appear more schematic than I'd like, for the sake of making it concise; what I'd ideally like is to be able to talk over the general ideas in the book, and decide for myself, finally!, what to make of it, on the principle that it's best to "Consult the master, not his pupils." (I quote a mathematician; I forget which one). I'm not an electronics engineer, though. If you'd be willing to talk to me about this I'd be delighted! If not - for all I know, you may be sick of the subject - perhaps you could let me know. Incidentally, I hope things are well with you.
Best wishes, Yours sincerely, R West
NOTE: I decided not to put these [perhaps] possible applications in the letter; didn't want to confuse him! Concealment, publicity, whitewash reports, leaks, official versions, behaviour of politicians trying do balance many considerations when they choose a candidate.
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[3] [REPLY : Received handwritten letter from his home address dated 28th December 1990 saying in effect he'd be pleased to talk to me but was leaving the country for three months and would resume. He enclosed a certain amount of material amplifying his book, though not much].
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[4] - Reminder letter to H B Rantzen Esq, 1 Southbury, Boundary Road, LONDON NW8 0RY, 13th Feb 1991
Thanks for your letter, and the enclosures, dated 28th December last year. I'm delighted that you're willing to talk to me about your book, and indeed your work, and I look forward to seeing you. I'd be pleased to see you at any time; Rather than wait, I thought I'd write now, although you said you'd be abroad for three months, in case you've had to change your plans as a result of the 'UN Peacekeeping operation' [sic] in the Gulf.
Hoping to hear from you, Yours sincerely, Rae West.
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[5] - MEETING, Tuesday 11 June, 1991, 11 a.m. at 1 Southbury [Southbury is a security-manned block of flats at the intersection of Boundary Road and I think Loudoun Road, not far from Swiss Cottage]. This was 2 days after returning from holiday in Porthmadog; not the day after, which I thought might be too much. I took along the following notes:
5.1 PRINTOUT OF NOTES I TOOK ALONG WITH ME:
- His examples include ratio of earth's year:day, speed of light in vacuo, speed of sound, ratio of minor: major axes of orbits, mean lunar month, temperature/ height/pressure of troposphere and tropopause; stature: 5' 8" best (or just acceptable?) for coherence, developments of civilisations (summary p 146), body temperature, sensation (Section 3.4 of 'Pattern Recognition', speech and hearing (Section 3.5), 'frequency of change-over from start of continuous sensation to awareness of separate disturbances in sight & hearing'; speech recognition and articulation; 'social patterns in an artificial environment i.e. conurbations; in education; in democracy, assuming that these are composed of randomly differing individuals the great majority of whom are 'modulated' by common, coherent social characteristics'
QUERIES:
IN MY LETTER: ..I wondered if, in the rather depressingly long time that's elapsed since the publication of your book,
1. Evidence about other planets in the solar system has yielded any similar or confirming results?
2. Possibly there are extensions to other fields: Brownian motion, or other aspects of the biology of small creatures? Perhaps economics, or social phenomena involving information?
3. Have newer digital communications [i.e. as opposed to analogue] altered any of your conclusions?
TECHNICAL: - 'modulation' and 'demodulation' in abstract of 'Pattern recognition'; but are these radio concepts really applicable? Couldn't he be making error that some computer people make, e.g. thinking in terms of bits or computer programs where they don't apply?
- Rantzen approx p 21: what is 'double indeterminacy'?
- e.g. Rantzen p 89; what exactly is a 'QUIP'? How can a unit of measurement be a sub-distribution?
- Does speech rely on syllables? Surely on phonemes?
- Surely air doesn't separate into layers if it's kept still, as Rantzen suggests? [Pp 51 ff on turbulence]
- Pattern in a carpet example (surely wrong, or counter-intuitive) 'maximum 98.45%' p 137.
- See my notes on Russell's ABC of Relativity: 'the notion of comparative stability is due to the fact that we're about the size we are on a planet that is not too hot..' [Einstein: pp 138 ff of Rantzen]. Does Rantzen understand relativity? He might - satellite coms always given as example of case in which it's applied
- Keynes 'On Probability' and idea that standard deviation goes hand in hand with the use of the 'mean' as a measure
- Littlewood's comment on dark adaptation give a different figure from Rantzen's p 100
- Jane Jacobs and towns; cp p 146 of Rantzen
- What about overkill, or evolution to handle things senses could never have met; colours, when Gombrich said Egyptians would never have seen bright reds or greens which we're used to; smell - many sorts of completely novel molecules can be smelt; vibration or rather unevenness down to tiny movements; why?
- Beam, ?ray, field, current, wave; note the strong suggestion of rurality in the words!/ Catt on electromagnetic theory and Heaviside; his and Catt's stuff never published
SPECULATIONS:
- What's the origin of radio waves? What 'are' they? What is light? Why does laser light look speckly or granular? Waves & particles; any light on this?
- How come glass, water, some crystals are transparent?
- Really dense matter, as from dwarf star etc. What would it look like, feel like?
- My stuff on human evolution and theories of bits of it, e.g. head hair, upright posture, PMT, menopause, 3 colour receptors & colour blindness in a proportion of population, depression as form of hibernation, lack of imagination and use of fire in pottery, metals, lime, smoke as preservative etc
- Leys, depending on long distance sighting, may be relevant.
- Effects on human mind of not being fully operational: 1. Near-death experiences as in New Scientist articles 5 May 1988 Susan Blakemore; 2. Babies and young children; 3. People under influence of LSD etc.
- Animal evolution; e.g. some can sense infra-red; why not humans?
- Penguin book on predictability of human settlements around the Mediterranean and development of races
- Blood temperature derivation given in his green-bound volume; seems to follow that all mammals should have the same blood temperature. Do they?
- Satellites and planets; since the earth is presumably not special from the point of view of the sun, shouldn't all planets and satellite i the solar system have periods deducible by his theory?
- Anything on UN?
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- DISCUSSION:
- 5.2 PRELIMINARY SPEECH [Which he produced for me, as we sat in easy chairs; his delivery through all this reminded me of Russell's TV appearances; and his emphasis on the 'Lord' of Lord Rayleigh gave me the impression of a man seeking recognition, as of Wells' desiring an FRS; and a man perhaps also in flight from Jewishness, as Muggeridge said of Beerbohm; b. 1903 approx, this is the Liberal Synagogue era:] "I divide science into two parts.. applied science, or what some people call technology .. we aim to get rid of differences.. engineering design.. well, that's all very fine and large when you can control things.. increasing number of theories where you can't.. radio propagation depends a great deal on the weather.. we cannot control the weather.. we cannot control language.. that comes from the parents.. hearing, sight, effects of gravity we have no control whatever.. even though we have no control we can recognise repeatable patterns.. but the patterns are never precisely identical.. what we can recognise is always slightly perturbed.. In radio propagation I studied patterns that arrived.. I was very happy to say the solution I found for radio waves [at STC, Harlow] .. indeterminacy.. so familiar I applied it to meteorology.. [the Met Office was at South Kensington; now it's at 'Ascot, Bracknell actually.'] .. radio propagation and meteorology directly correlated.. they made me a Fellow.. but I've had no notification.. It's practically a dead society.. They moved without telling me..
There are obvious analogies with speech.. I applied the same statistical solution.. the process is plotting pattern recognition against the variate you happen to be concerned with.. temperature, amplitude of increasing ?changes of speech.. I've since found the same pattern in gravity.. It's all in the same mind whether thought eye, ear, temperature changes which you can feel.. I came to the conclusion that when we attempt to recognise patterns.. our senses have reached the maximum possible.. we have the mental capacity to look closely at patterns.. and that is never exactly 100%..
.. have developed the habit of sharply differentiating between the amount of pattern recognised is small parts of the pattern and the change in the amplitude of what I consider the variate, which could be anything.. when you attempt.. maximum recognition corresponds to minimum perturbations.. so to maximise recognition I take any of 2 or 3 ways to normalise [NB: He seems to use this in his own special sense] statistics - e.g. variation of temperature with time I took the length of day which is one complete pattern forgetting variation due to moisture, clouds, .. and so on.. and larger pattern formed by large number of days which we call a year.. choose as randomisation constant figures which are universally accepted - e.g. radius of smooth earth in meteorology, 6370 km.. horizontal layering 6370 miles to the -1 [prob. error for km].. speech.. large number of syllables..
Importance of expecting recognition .. small change has one random law, the random walk of Lord Rayleigh and for big changes.. logarithmic law, the Weber-Fechner law.. for example, decibels.. My solution has never been queried.. perfectly easy to check mathematically.. even though the effect of applying these statistics has been to produce a match between theory and practice..
[He went on to produce evidence, which he repeats in his typescript of 'Pattern Recognition in Man and his Environment', of the casual or negligent attitude of the NHS and RNID in making equipment and testing his theory. In my opinion, with which he seemed rather gleefully to concur, they hadn't understood his theory; otherwise the hospital 'Chief Physicist' wouldn't have e.g. made the equipment give inverted speech, which it seems is unintelligible, 'sounds like Chinese', and wouldn't have carried out tests on patients without setting the adjustments correctly. He mentioned a report in the Telegraph: Clayton, he thinks, is to look into the NHS. Rantzen is currently awaiting a reply to his letter of complaint...]"
5.3 QUESTIONS AND HIS REPLIES:
- [Isn't speech divided into phonemes, not syllables?] "Speech is recognised by modulation.. by recognition of syllables.. the truth of the matter is you recognise the articulation, not the whole speech.. We teach our children to articulate, we don't attempt to alter the larynx tone.. If you vocalise without articulating you might be able to tell health or sex, but you'd never recognise a word. On the other hand if you articulate without breath .. lip reading.. quite a lot can be attained.."
- [What do you mean by a pattern?] ".. let me give you another example. if you see a hill with a definite coherent shape you'd say that was made by a man.. another example, a beautiful country scene, a haystack with straw around it.. you sit on the straw.. something sharp comes in contact with your posterior.. you find a beautiful brooch.. you know at once it was put there by a man so the distinction between natural products and artefacts deliberately avoids the necessity of worrying about random perturbations.. [Page 137 says a pattern in a carpet has maximum recognition of 98.45%. (On rereading it, the section looks as though it says this, but the carpet example appears completely irrelevant) But with this pattern of tiny dots it's clear there's a pattern, but it's higher than 98.45%..] It applies to natural phenomena; in all artefacts you've taken action to eliminate variation so there's not much use for pattern recognition."
- [What's the principle of your hearing aid?] "[conventional] hearing aids boost volume, and high frequencies (they don't deal with the part below 2000) and try to keep other noises out.. [mine].. average syllable is 130 milliseconds long.. there are 480 quips in the syllable pattern.. the ear contains a channel 3.5 cms long containing organic fluid.. 20,000 nerves in the basilar membrane.. sound impinges on it.. sound takes ?130 milliseconds to travel through this tube.. [So you split the sound up into parts?] Yes, exactly [He beams. What happens to the separate parts? Are they all stored by the brain, then averaged in some way? - Unfortunately, at this point his explanation stopped; he mentioned physiology, his limitations etc. On my second visit, I established that the little bits are amplified either logarithmically or linearly, depending I think on amplitude, then just put them together again in a stream; the net effect, he said, is to selectively amplify consonants] I have designed a system for partially deaf listeners which I submitted to television manufacturers but nobody's taken it up.. [He produced photocopied sheet showing sound channel split, apparently at .273 millisec intervals, into 2 signals, q.v.; but it remained unclear exactly what the circuit is intended to do] Cardiograms.. the main parameters of heartbeats correspond to my theory.. need to divide [each beat] into 480.. I asked manufacturer what the ?resolution was.. he said oh it's quite good enough, 70 cycles.. Well, that's nowhere near enough.. I've known cases.. apparently normal cardiogram.. dead within a week.."
- [Is there a principle that you follow with your theory, some easy way to apply it to recognise patterns?] "Well, for example, assuming good communications.. the recognisable unit is the individual.. start to recognise a community; to be a community it must by definition have ideas in common. Divide or multiply by 480. You see, there are patterns within patterns within patterns. For example, I deduced [with figures from Whitaker] the biggest town ought to be 8 million. .. Civilisation.. the poles are cold, the equator is hot.. at some point the air flow to the equator equals the flow to the poles.. Varies with cos cubed phi.. atmosphere gives regular repeats of seasons; my theory deals with the day [Are you saying seasons in this zone are more predictable, definite, than outside?] Er the diurnal cycle is more intense.. our recognition is a byproduct of these processes.. Over the last 2000 years wars have been the most prolific cause of civilisation, however ?beastly they may be .. Greece, Rome, the Normans, then us.. I dare say the same about Japan.. wars are bringing it I hope to Iraq and Iran; it may take some time.."
- [Do you think these hospital people didn't understand your theory?] ".. They couldn't control their junior staff" [i.e. couldn't get them to carry out tests as per instruction. He dug around for a letter of apology from Royal National Throat Nose and Ear Hospital, which of course didn't give much away]
- [What exactly is a 'quip'?] "There are 479.85 quips overlapping different amounts as they go.. their density and therefore ?component of recognition at the mid point of the distribution..."
- [Can you explain in English where the figure of 480 quips comes from? Unfortunately, he couldn't, but referred me to the appendix of his book, described, wrongly, as 'The Derivation of the .. Neogaussian Distribution']
- [Can you explain this diagram of the distribution? - Unfortunately, I still got no satisfactory explanation of his diagram of half a Gaussian distribution with an extra part added to the left and shaded rectangles hovering about. He said at one point, I'm sure, that the log of the normal distribution is a straight line; this is of course wrong, since log exp (-x^2) needs two transformations to make it linear. I therefore infer that his maths is ropey - as is further suggested by the fact that he claims his results have been 'checked by professional mathematicians.' It occurred to me that the maths might have been contributed by an underling when he was working, and which he may not himself understand]
- [Dark adaptation: Littlewood gives an enormous range of 10^15, much greater than Rantzen's 230,000] "I'm not talking about extremes; I'm talking about patterns."
- [What about senses handling things they couldn't have adapted to, like very bright colours?] Masers were developed first.. mid-50s, for microwaves.. Laser light - why does it look speckly? What would very dense matter feel like? Can colour blindness be a useful adaptation? Near death experiences and other effects of mind not being normal] "I don't know .. Lasers achieve coherence, most devices are purely thermal.. Why does it look speckly? Er.. I don't know.. I don't know.. I'm assuming a mind is working properly.."
- [Most people aren't very interested in radio; any applications to everyday life?] ".. one of the most important attitudes is recognise anything repetitive.. baby recognises mother, bonding. Much is obviously inherited: learning to speak practically something they do themselves.. Enormous proportion of what we learn is inherited.. Animals are much less intelligent.. what these animal rights people don't realise.. saw on TV a foxhunt.. as soon as the fox had got a little way ahead, it was stalking a duck.. Eagles are trainable.. on a boat on the ?Rhine.. eagle up in a tree.. Captain took a fish, threw it in the water.. it flew down from its eyrie and caught it, not in its mouth..." [Its talons, I suggested. Perhaps as a result of a lifetime in labs, Rantzen seemed curiously ignorant of the animal world; obviously eagles are trainable! I wondered how widespread this sort of pre-Attenborough ignorance is].
- [Anything on smell?] "It's not very important. I've almost lost my sense of smell!"
- [Relativity?] "The speed of light is not constant.. astronomy is the most coherent of all the sciences.. I have a derivation of the speed of light.." [He gets out a very old translation of a non-mathematical book by Einstein, which he had quoted from in his book, notably figures taken from the well-known eclipse expedition. I think there's a mistake in his calculations; he has two figures, like expected value -10, actual value +9, and he's calculated percentage error as about 200%, which of course seems a fallacious procedure. Later he told me his theory predicted the variations to be expected in the results; they were of course very variable.]
- [There's a problem with some of these results; they seem to come from nowhere. What connection can there be between man's perceptions and the length of a lunar month? .. No satisfactory reply, I thought]
5.4 A FEW EXTRA COMMENTS
- Wagner: When I was young we had a record.. about 36 themes [not 'lietmotifs' I think].. libretto is a bastard art.. In Wagner every character is identified by type, a Nibelung, a giant, the Valkyrie.. none by his own individual character... [I don't think he used the word 'racism']
- 2nd World War: Large number of low power transmitters.. I looked into ways to broadcast at the same frequency.. added a high frequency signal.. but it was audible.. that gave me the start of my idea.. then the war ended..
- United Nations: I moved them from Lake Success.. UN conspicuous for the fact that the loyalty of the senior staff was to the nations that had appointed them, not to the secretary-general.. Trygve Lie was the first secretary-general.. strong Scandinavian element at that time.. Number of staff was directly proportional to the finance paid.. About 2/3 was paid by the USA.. staff as nearly in proportion 2/3 US to 1/3 between the other 90 nations..
- Those companies that invested in ways to control the environment of their signals: lasers, optical fibres..
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[6] Summary: Some of his Claimed Results [from his Green-back File MS]
6.1 Annual mean temperature gradient (dry air, latitude 37.5 degrees)*
4 days heat flow to tropopause each 1/4
6.2 Mean microwave path bending
1/4 of mean temperature gradient (4/3 earth)
6.3 Ratio of Daily temperature cycle/ annual temperature cycle
4/.01095
6.4 Annual mean height of the tropopause
Radius of earth 6370 kms x .002084
6.5 Tropopause pressure/ surface pressure
(.01095)^1/3 = 0.222
6.6 Mean velocity of sound in troposphere
Height of diurnal cycle wave / day / .01095^2 x .002084
6.7 Microwave radio refractivity
Mean gradient 1/4 of earth's surface random field at 0.002084 x that at horizon + horizon loss etc.
6.8 Mean height of geostationary satellite
98.45% of base of ionosphere / .002084
6.9 Mean lunar month **
(1 day/ .01095)^3/4 = 29.54 days
6.10 Mean height of moon
(100/1.095)^1/2 x (tropopause height/ .002084 + 6370) + 8%
6.11 Earth's orbital period: earth's rotation period
1 year = 3/4 day/.002054 - 1/4
6.12 Major axis of earth's orbit/ minor axis of earth's orbit
(Height of tropopause/(radius of earth + 1/2 height of tropopause))^2
6.13 'Velocity of light waves' [inverted commas sic]
(100/1.095)^2 x mean velocity of earth relative to 'fixed' stars
6.14 PATTERN RECOGNITION IN MAN/ PATTERNS IN SOCIAL ORGANISATION, DEMOCRACY, EDUCATION. See below. This is material mostly NOT present in the book Rantzen had published, 'Uncertainty in Nature...'
* [Typical example of his proof:] 'The masked temperature gradient (quip density) in the vertical profile within 'single-temperature' air volumes at the tropopause should theoretically be 1.095% of the coherent maximum quip density in the whole distribution, the latter obviously being that at ground level. But the masking gravitational perturbations are, within 'single-temperature' air volumes, volumetrically isotropic, and constitute the 'pressure'. The annual mean (vertical) pressure ratio, from that at ground to that at the tropopause (at latitude 37 1/2 degrees etc) should therefore be .01095^(1/3) or .222. In the I.C.A.O. standard atmosphere, this ratio is .223.
Further, K S Mitra has reported that the daily solar tide fluctuation at Washington DC is about 1.6 mm of mercury, or about .0021 of the normal surface pressure of 760 mm of mercury. From neogaussian statistics we should expect this ratio to be .002084.'
** [Another proof or 'proof':] 'The classical laws for a satellite in a circular orbit at distance D rotating with orbital period T are that the pull of the earth varies with D^-2 and T^(-4/3). These laws include only the coherent terms and take no account of the random perturbations and the amount they mask. The moon is a 'dead satellite' [sic] in that it is not spinning on its axis other than the once to present the same face to the earth during each of its rotations round the earth. The perturbations on it from the spinning earth are random during one earth day, and the whole maximally recognisable (coherent) moon orbit therefore lasts (100/1.095)^(3/4) or 29.54 days; the published figure .. is 29.53 days.' [Continues with material essentially identical to treatment in 'Uncertainty in Nature and Communication' including the moon's mean distance.]
6.14 PATTERN RECOGNITION IN MAN/ PATTERNS IN SOCIAL ORGANISATION, DEMOCRACY, EDUCATION.
- IN MAN
Stature, 'Evolution of the Coherent Society' - 'full annual (seasonal) temperature patterns and nearly constant mean temperature gradient .. only over the narrow range of latitude from 29.8 to 45.2', are treated as in 'Uncertainty..'. Body Temperature however isn't, I think, there; here's his derivation of it. After, Rantzen deals with sight, TV pictures, Frenchmen Fizeau and Foucault and Fresnel; then with speech, articulation, filters, the Koenig scale etc, just as in 'Uncertainty..'
'Perhaps the most obvious maximally stable (sic) parameter in the world in which man has evolved is its very nearly constant long-term mean temperature, and the biggest single factor in this is the 'gravitational perturbation' temperature, the 'base' temperature of the air without its additional diurnal solar heating near the surface of the earth. This is given as 216.66 K in the I.C.A.O. Standard Atmosphere tables, the temperature of the tropopause at about latitude 40. In maximally stable conditions, the annual mean temperature gradient in the vertical profile is 1/4, so that the tropopause (gravitational) temperature is 3/4 of that at the surface, and the latter is therefore 4/3 of 216.66, or 288.88 K. This is within 1 degree of the I.C.A.O. figure for their standard atmosphere. At mean latitudes there are four diurnal cycles of solar heating one above and after the other in the vertical profile up to the tropopause, so that each repetitive diurnal cycle accounts for an average temperature range of (288.88 - 216.66)/4 or 18.055 K. The mean of the very long term neogaussian surface air temperature distribution is therefore 288.88 K and the maximum recognisable in 98.905% of the time (the year) is 288.88 + 18.055 or 306.9 K. At mean latitudes and over a very long period of time (hundreds of years) the maximum recognisable [sic] air temperature at the surface, averaged over the highest in the 1.095% (4 day) periods of the 'worst' years, should not therefore exceed 306.9/0.98905, or 310.3 K, 98.8 F. [Note: This seems to prove that all warm blooded animals have exactly the same blood temperature; is this true?]
- This chapter ends: 'Man can already recognise subconsciously many of the important patterns in his natural environment to his maximum possible extent. He has, in addition, just started consciously to organise relatively new social patterns - nations, democracies, schools, companies etc - and it seems reasonable to believe (and hope!) that he will ultimately design these to permit maximum recognition of the patterns in them down to the limit imposed by the means of the random differences between individuals in them.'
- PATTERNS IN SOCIAL ORGANISATION:
'Long-term planning the future development of social patterns must be preceded by selecting, and if possible normalising, a variate, and though we have as yet no scale or units with which to express amounts of evolutionary change, it is possible to arrive at rough figures for the important intervals in the distribution of time. The dinosaurs.. living about 200 million years ago.. we will assume fully recognisable (stable) and dominant over all other animal life for 100 million years. .. no physical change of form would have been recognisable as part of their main evolutionary pattern in .002084 of 100 million years or less [sic], or about 210,000 years or less. It appears that much the same has been true physically of the brain of man. In the special case of man, it seems reasonable to assume additionally that the ultimate result of his greatly enhanced powers of communication would be to extend to the whole human race the effects of natural environmental influences at a 'mixing' velocity which would otherwise have applied only between individuals or relatively very small groups of them. The maximum period is which no coherent evolutionary mental change would be recognisable in the whole race would then be (100-S)% of 210,000 or 2,300 years, and the maximum recognisable but predominantly random change between the individuals in the race, on which all evolution ultimately depends, would then last for (100-S)% of 2,300 or about 25 years. As one might have expected, this is about the time spacing between generations. All this suggests that we might base our statistical analysis of any social pattern on 25 years as the quip in time, and the single adult, or over time periods more than 25 years, the family, as the quip in the population distribution of any social pattern.
There are three generalities which, at maximum recognition, then apply to all the analyses in this Part 4:
(a) Complete patterns, and single quips within them, are random and unrecognisable over +- 1/4 of their normalised means.
(b) Gradients or 'directions' of evolution ( long term aims) become recognisable only after 1/sigma^2 approx= 5 1/4 generations, say 130 years. There is plenty of evidence in recent social history that large environmental changes in shorter periods of time are often not to our long-term advantage.
(c) In social patterns, the Random Causal Set is the source of the 'human' factors (Darwin called it 'Variability') which are nearly always different between individuals and families. The Coherent Causal Set includes the forces of convention, tradition, morality and religion, law etc which may act on (modulate) the great majority of the individuals or families in the society.
Pattern Recognition in an Artificial Environment.
Accepting that man's mental evolution should continue so as to maximise his pattern recognition in his natural environment, there are four main ill-effects of living in surroundings from which 'nature' has been almost completely excluded..
a. In Perception. We appear already to have evolved the ability subconsciously to recognise a number of functionally important cyclic patterns as a direct result of the presence of similar patterns.. It is known that men totally enclosed in rooms.. fall out of step with the natural environment in a month or two.. cyclic controls must be regularly synchronised from without.. Little is as yet known of this..
b. In Physical Well-being. ..'slums' and 'squalor', conditions often wrongly thought to be mostly the result of poverty. There are slum areas in many large cities in which cars and television sets are commonplace, and drinking saloons and betting shops thrive.. unsuitable for children.. plant and animal waste products often lie about.. as filth or refuse until carted away by costly and inevitably understaffed public services. .. small animal life .. can survive.. only in conditions in which they are likely to act as carriers of disease.. The root cause of any possible pestilence is almost always man.. It is much easier to maintain good standards of hygiene and home cleanliness in a cottage in the country..
c. Mental Health. .. minimum of living space within which they can find security and rear their young. They tend to become upset and aggressive when others encroach.. The main symptoms .. are today all too apparent.. A great increase in crime and anti-social behaviour generally, as well as social unrest, organised protests and often unruly demonstrations. .. a general lessening of self-reliance and a quite unjustified feeling that help from others is a natural 'right'.. Greatly increased greed for material possessions and envy of those who have acquired more of them ("Keeping up with the Joneses"), and other undesirable characteristics clearly the result of over-competitive conditions.. social services and the police force.. until even some of those who work in them start to show signs of the same mental disorders they have been employed to alleviate in others.. 'sport' has become a form of professional entertainment.. noisy and often violent partisanship rather than.. healthy exercise and the self-control of good sportsmanship..
d. In Communications. Communication, whether by speech, education, transport, or by telecommunication involves the conscious intent to pass on to others information (news) of all kinds, whether 'progressive' or not... in both road and telephone networks, traffic density rises even more sharply when too large a population centre is organised as a single urban unit.. the great advantages the private car can bring .. have often to be largely foregone.. travel within very large towns is both a nightmare and a public danger.
Nearly all of these.. have increased considerably... during the last century or two, a period within which the population of some highly industrialised countries has risen by more than 50% [sic; surely much too low].. It seems that many of them could be greatly reduced in.. 50 to 100 years by the gradual effects of town planning rules. To apply such rules, however, there must be some way of defining the 'maximally recognisable' population patterns, and in this neogaussian statistics can be of great value.. Whitakers Almanac 1969 [1967 figures]..
a. In England, 45.7 m people in 50,000 square miles
b. 208 cities and boroughs with more than 20,000 people in each: total population 19.5 million; average 94,000 each therefore. There were also 94 smaller population centres with less than 20,000 each.
c. There were 133 urban districts with more than 20,000 each, totalling 4.7 million [Turns out later he could have collected the >20,000 places together; it's not clear why he didn't]
d. There were 46 counties, including Greater London with 7.9 million people in 620 square miles.
.. the whole population may be considered in two parts, those randomly distributed throughout the countryside.. and those concentrated in towns and cities in numbers sufficient to correlate with the whole urban population of the country. [sic; not clear what this is supposed to mean.]
THE URBAN POPULATION There are four urban and other [sic] population patterns recognisable..
Principal Cities, each .. population greater than .. mean of the urban population, and each of which is, therefore, recognisable as part of this distribution pattern.
Towns.. include all cities, boroughs, and urban districts with populations less than that at the mean of the mean of the whole urban population. Single towns do not therefore recognisably correlate with the whole urban pattern, but several towns close together often do so.
Townlets.. population centres so small that they are apparently independent of the total urban population, even in considerable numbers. They are patterns within patterns, and part of the rural population.
Villages are even smaller random concentrations of rural populations
.. the fundamental distinction between urban and rural populations depends on the population density , and therefore on the environment both within and outside the towns and principal cities. [sic; not clear etc]
The total urban population in all principal cities and towns above 20,000 [NB: he implicitly abandons his definition of 'urban' as related to density!] was 24.2 million. In a neogaussian distribution of the urban population, the mean would lie at 255 of the total, so that the total in all cities and groups of towns above this mean recognisable as part of the urban pattern of the whole country would be 3/4 of 24.2 m, or 18.15 m. The smallest recognisable principal city will then be 1.095% of 18.15 million, or 199,000. The average principal city would be twice this size, or 398,000 and the largest five times that at the mean, or 995,000. There were in fact 19 cities with more than 199,000 each, their average was 395,000, and the largest, Birmingham, was 1.1 million. London was a county, and is best regarded as a completely urbanised state in a federated nation.
All towns or groups of towns with less than 199,000 lie below the mean of the urban distribution, and if the population density in them depends on both population and area, the smallest of them must be .01095^.5 = .1046 times 199,000 or 20,800. This is the lowest limit of the urban population, and the largest concentration within which the population are more likely to be rural than urban. For a smooth transition between all the patterns involved, from the principal Cities, through the Towns down to the smallest Town (the quip in the urban distribution), and the maximum discrimination between the patterns involved
- The smallest Principal City must be the same size as the largest town or group of towns (199,000) just correlating with the whole urban population. The largest town or group of towns must be 1/(.01095)^.5 = 9.56 times the smallest town or group of towns.<>
And if the population density continues to fall with size,
- The smallest town will be the same size as the largest townlet.
- The smallest townlet will be .01095^.5 = .1046 times the largest townlet.
The smallest town is then 20,800, confirming that there was no great error involved in excluding all centres with less than 20,000 from the total urban population. We thus have, for our definitions based only on environmental considerations,
Principal Cities from 995,000 - 199,000 URBAN
Towns (or groups of towns) from 199,000 - 20,800 URBAN
Townlets from 20,800 to .1046 x 20,800 = 2,180 RURAL
Villages, random distributions with less than 2,180 RURAL
The total urban population was 32.1 m, and the total rural population 45.7 - 32.1 or 13.6 million. England in 1967 was 70% urban and 30% rural by population. From these figures, the average town should be a quarter of 199,000 or about 50,000. There were in fact 322 towns and urban districts between 199,000 and 20,000, their total population was 16.7 m, so that their mean was 51,900. It is to be expected that the influence of the total population on the size of towns would be much less marked than is the case of the principal cities. The towns are more 'random' and much less clearly definable than the principal cities.
The Area Distribution and Population Densities.
In view of the variety of population patterns adjacent to one another, it seems reasonable to assume that the minimum density at the outskirts of both principal cities and towns would, on average, be the average population density of the whole country (914 per sq mile). In any neogaussian distribution within principal cities, the maximum recognisable density would then be 100/1.095 times this minimum, or 83,470 per square mile and their just recognisable average density in the urban distribution above the mean would be 914(100/1.095)^.5 or 8,370 per sq mile. A maximum density of 83,470 per sq miles corresponds to that of 4 people (including 2 children) in a small three-bedroom house on two floors, on 420 sq ft of land, with equal house and garden land areas ['Gardening is by far the most popular and important hobby for townspeople'], plus a further 50% area for offices, factories, open spaces etc plus another 5% for roads and railways. This seems to be roughly in line with achievable present day standards. The total population of the 19 principal cities was in fact 7.5 million and their area (at 8,370 per sq mile) would therefore be 860 sq miles. On this basis, the figures for Greater London were not much different from that which would result if all the other principal cities of England were placed immediately adjacent to one another. No wonder living conditions in parts of it are so very unsatisfactory, and very little improved by a comparatively distant and inaccessible green belt!
In the absence of more detailed information, it might, probably optimistically, be assumed that the maximum density in the towns, even in those as large as Luton or Brighton, would be about the average density in the principal cities, and if the minimum density at their outskirts is still 914 per sq mile, the average density in the towns becomes 914 (100/1.095)^.25 or 2,800 per sq mile. The total area occupied by all 16.7 million people in the towns would then be 16.7 x 10^6/ 2800 or 6,000 sq miles, and the average town would be 6000/332 or about 18 sq miles. These figures lead to the same average town population of 18 x 2800 or about 50,000 people as was previously deduced. London, the principal cities and all the towns, a total urban population of 32.1 million people, would cover an area of (620 + 860 + 6000) or about 7,500 sq miles. The total rural population in all the townlets and villages must then be (45.7 - 32.1) or 13.6 million people in (50,000 - 7,500) or 42,500 sq miles, an average density of very roughly 320 per sq mile. On the basis of the three-bedroom house 'standard' already referred to above, though without its garden since in rural areas it is almost completely surrounded by countryside, this is equivalent to a ratio of building area to total of about 1/560. This amount of building should be quite unobtrusive even in rural areas, since it is less than P(R) = .002084 = 1/480 of the total. In England, about 3/4 of the 42,500 sq miles of rural area is agricultural, with farmers and their workers and families accounting for a basic average population density of perhaps 1/4 of this, or 80 per sq mile. A near average small townlet of about 5000 people then corresponds to a concentration of the difference between 320 per sq mile and 80 per sq mile from just over 20 sq miles, and such a townlet is therefore to be expected every 4 or 5 miles (straight line distance) in any direction even in farming areas. This seems to be noticeably a greater population density than that in such attractive areas as the Cotswolds, the Lake District, and the Yorkshire dales, but is obviously much less than in the alleged 'rural' parts of the country near principal cities or industrial areas in the Home Counties, the Midlands, the West Riding and South Lancashire.
.. The Planning Rules .. intent .. should be to set up and maintain.. an environment in which people, especially those below middle age, can live and progress naturally.. more by close association with their natural environment than by the acquisition of the maximum possible amount of material wealth. Such conditions could on average be reached at worst within 130 years.. In evolution, to act in haste is often to repent at leisure.
1. Planning .. should be directed toward achieving the population and density figures given above. .. within the next generation the population .. may have risen to the point at which buildings will start to become obtrusive even in the rural districts.. that is to say.. the ratio.. may rise above .002084. We should therefore start immediately to discourage any further increase in total population.
2. In-filling in our principal cities and towns to maintain excessive population densities should be stopped, except occasionally for elderly people who might prefer (and can afford!) to live in such conditions. Families might be strongly encouraged to live in low-density (greener) areas far from town centres by the offer of subsidised housing, with schools nearby and good, preferably free, urban transport. There is, ultimately, more reason to allow free transport to families with children than to the elderly. ..'
3. The central area of a city or town should be mostly a 'green' area, particularly if there is a river there, with only such special services as a university, a zoo, a sports stadium, a library, museum and art gallery, and a national theatre etc in it. Parks and public gardens should be randomly distributed and shaped.. High population density areas should be as near to the outer rim of the town as possible.. Main shopping centres and big stores should be outside the central area with their own parking facilities.. Achieving the figures above should make all green belts unnecessary.. Only exceptionally should buildings (churches, the town hall, radio towers etc) be permitted to rise above treetop height..
4. Roads and railways in the central areas of principal cities should, wherever possible, be underground, and public transport in these areas preferably free. Car parks, main line railway and bus terminals should line up with inner transport systems at the perimeter of the central area. The inner transport systems should be as automatic as possible. .. Roads are the one feature of the artificial environment always to be encouraged, though many more of them should be designed as boulevards..
.. The mixing velocities in the lower atmosphere should prove valuable by providing statistical information on the rate of dispersal of fog, industrial effluents, car and aeroplane exhaust fumes, and even of noise...
DEMOCRACY
The ideal democracy is one in which, though there are many small random differences between the wishes and needs of its adults, both with time and in their space distribution, government should be representative and reflect the wishes of the electorate in its coherent policies. We shall take the most 'usual' family, 2 adults plus 2 children, and 1 generation (25 years) as our quips. The smallest recognisable electing unit (ward) is then 1/P(R), a total population of 960 electors and children. If wards differ one from another both in location and with time, councillors should seek re-election every 25 (.01095)^.5 or 2 1/2 to 3 years. 1/.01095 [square root sign has been erased; suggesting he takes these things from a hat..] 91 councillors could form a council servicing 960 x 91 = 87,400 population, and, in a 2-tier governmental system, each council area could also elect 1 MP in a Parliament of 91 MPs for a state of 91 x 87,400 = 8 million total population. If the average period of time an adult elector may exercise his right to vote is about 50 years, and his preferred political pattern varies with his age and family background as well as with his environmental conditions, any government policy becomes recognisably part of his preferred coherent political program only after .01095^.5 x 50 years, so that it should be possible for him to reconsider the long-term program he would like at elections held about every 5 years.
In 1967, the total population of the United Kingdom was 55 million. To put about 630 MPs in a single chamber can only almost eliminate the influence of each on state policy, hopelessly overload the legislature, and replace the wishes of any one member and his electorate by the dictates of a party whip. In U.K. there should be 9 'state' parliaments, each with about 91 MPs, 1 [state] each for Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, 6 in England to express special coherent pattern features (language, ethnic origin, tradition etc) desired by the majority.. the latter arranged to distribute the problems of over-dense populations (London, Lancashire, and West Riding) one to each state. States with mixed populations (one or more minorities each more than 10%, with different languages or other racial characteristics) and much less than 8 million people, should still have electorates averaging about 87,400 each and parliaments of about 91 members, but with some system of proportional representation to elect a number of MPs to represent each electorate. Each regional parliament could then send members, in numbers proportional to state population, to a national parliament (a third tier of government), again of 91, dealing only with matters common to all states, such as defence, foreign and interstate affairs, telecommunications of all kinds, common justice, and if desired, common welfare etc; as well as control of all vested interests (unions, large companies, nationalised or not) extending over more than 1 state and more than .002084 of the working population (about 60,000 workers). One additional feature seems logically to form part of any well-planned democracy. There should clearly be a president or constitutional monarchy, concerned not with political pattern, but with fostering relations with other heads of nations, with the freedom and rights of the individual, with the art of living, and other matters common to all true democracies in which the wishes of the individual or family (not the state or national government) should ultimately be recognised as the first priority.
EDUCATION
.. two overlapping patterns, one .. from birth to school-leaving, the other from birth through higher education, if any, to the end of the subsequent career. We exclude both exceptionally gifted and subnormal children from the first pattern, and leisure and other activities after retirement from the second. The shorter pattern is then the predominantly random part below the mean of the longer pattern, and we can at present normalise both by taking the average retiring age to be 64 (at present 65 for men, 60 for women. There are then three sections of the overlapping patterns.
a. Home education. The mean of the longer pattern (school leaving) is then at an average 1/4 of 64 or 16 years, and the mean of the shorter pattern is at 4 years. Home education of 3 to 5 years is clearly the most important of all, since it includes weaning, elementary hygiene, speech, walking etc and the earliest recognition of patterns in and around the home. In it the characteristics of the individual child should be the predominant consideration, and it should therefore be nearly always the responsibility mainly of the parents, particularly the mother.
b. Schooling is the recognisable and highly desirable (consistent) educational pattern above four years. There should be the maximum possible choice of schools, with minorities in mixed societies also minorities in schools. Excluding such important matters as cost, teaching ability etc, the statistics of an educationally independent school should be:-
The whole school should be for about 1/P(R) or 480 'randomly' different children (on average).
The smallest class for the children who find learning most difficult should be for 1.095% of the school, or 5 children.
The average class in the whole school should be twice the smallest, between 10 and 11 children.
The largest class, for children who can learn most easily, should be for about 26 children.
The school curriculum should be aimed at developing pattern recognition, not at imparting the maximum number of facts, and, in addition to the three Rs, should include recognition of patterns in space (local, national, and world geography, nature, geophysics and a little astronomy), patterns in time (national and world history, with a little on the history of the earth and man on it), patterns in society and behaviour (the family, parenthood, civics, democracy, ethics, social welfare, hygiene etc), patterns in communication (speech, numeracy, writing, other languages etc) with some science, art, sport etc. In all cases the indeterminacy in what we know, and what we can and cannot recognise, should be pointed out. Children should finally be told how little we have, within ourselves, so far progressed.. as a species still 'children' of 2 or 3 million years in a total life of, hopefully, more than 100 million years.
c. Higher education after school, should be for a very carefully selected career, a coherent system to which the young adult should be prepared to adapt him or herself. Career training, if any, should last minimum almost nil (48 x P(R) years) up to .01095^.5 = .1046 of 48 years (5 years) in any specialised institution, since careers vary in both kind and with time. The minimum recognisable specialised career training might be for .1046 of 5 years, or 6 months. This suggests that a 6 month training in matters common to nearly all careers, in office and shop floor organisation, in business routines, in staff relations etc is desirable in the great majority of cases in or after school. .. The figures should be regarded only as long-term aims.
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[7] Notes I made replying to his 'Pattern Recognition in Man and his Environment', and the letter I expanded them into - MY NOTES MADE BEFORE WRITING, WITH COMMENTS ON 'PATTERN RECOGNITION..':-
Introduction:
- My decision to say what I think, since I'm interested and this seems the only option.
- I can afford luxury of saying I don't understand, please clarify; official people can't, they're selected by exams and by their jobs to be that type; they may feel they were trapped, like politicians with TV interviewers. So this type of criticism mayn't have been met by Rantzen at all
- I assume object is to achieve clarity in exposition, without which it may continue to go unnoticed. [People may have objects of course, e.g. Newton deliberately wrote bafflingly]. So my criticism on that basis
- Discouraging fact that since 1968 his exposition is almost unchanged; suggests either not interested in making himself understood, or not able to. Either alternative is unfortunate.
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Philosophical:
- Idealised 'circles', 'lines' etc seems Platonic and not necessarily correct or relevant; e.g. the word 'circle' is applied to things which therefore are circles
- Intelligence emphasis seems wrong: size, strength, tools, bipedal gait, warmbloodedness etc just as necessary
- Pattern recognition emphasis seems wrong; animals can do it; intelligence seems much more abstract and high-level
- Irrelevance: NHS testing to proof/ Lorentz transformation to relativity
- Suspicion of bias to telecomms, e.g. in ideas about 'civilisation', in same way computer people often think 'bits' measure mental activity. Example: is vision really comparable to TV? All TV does is send a rough image of something from one end to another, while vision is the process of perception, of understanding what's all around. Would you say a lens and a piece of paper, with an image on, models human perception?
- 'our natural environment' doesn't include upper atmosphere or microwave transmissions or geostationary satellites
- Dinosaurs 'dominant over all other life'
- '5(9) 100% precision, objectivity and certainty (100% pattern recognition) are all impossible.' Are you 100% sure of this?
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Stylistic:
- Things in single quotes. He should say what he means.
- Underlinings, parentheses, 'in that', 'by means of' also obscure meaning
- Prentice-Hall quotation
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Mathematical:
- Doesn't define, or illustrate, terms; e.g. many expressions used before they're officially introduced. Pattern, coherent, quip, modulate, normalise, unrecognisable, mask, 'at', 'shape', 'basic indeterminacy'
- Doesn't explain how his distribution is derived, despite his claim.
- Why rectangular distribution; and given this, why not irregular, stepped effect? Why should left-hand be straight line? Why should there be a Gaussian distribution? [Quote Keynes on law of error]
- Mathematical mistakes: conceptual error in percentage error columns/ error in log of Gaussian being straight line/ error in use of sigmas in the appendix; something like sigma = .2 therefore sigma is .3 therefore sigma is wrong/ square root of sums of squares of earth's velocity round sun and sun as 'average'/ 1 12 the probability of the quip
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Dear Mr Rantzen,
Thank you for explaining your work to me and entertaining me on the 11th; it was a pleasure to meet you and your wife.
After reading 'Pattern Recognition in Man and His Environment' closely several times, and rereading 'Uncertainty in Nature and Communication' along with it, I thought I'd write immediately, as we more-or-less agreed. I found myself in an ethical dilemma, since your books interest me, and I wanted to clarify them to my own satisfaction, but I feel what I have to say might appear impolite, even though that's not my intention. However, taking the view that the only way I'm likely to satisfy my curiosity is to be blunt, I'll try to set out as clearly as I can the problems I find with your books.
Let me first make a couple of points: As a free agent I can afford the luxury of asking "Please clarify, this isn't clear to me"; official people aren't permitted to do this unless they are eminent enough to be very confident. Because of this syndrome the type of criticisms I make may be new to you; for all I know, you may have faced a succession of evasive people up to now, as is strongly suggested by the correspondence you showed me, and the interminable delays of the researchers you've been associated with.
Second, I'm assuming the object of the exercise is to achieve clarity in exposition. This is the view I took in my own books, and I think I probably did more for computer education in this country than, say, 1000 teachers. But publication can of course have other objects; for example Newton dressed up his discoveries in geometry, making them almost incomprehensible. So I'll explicitly make the point that I believe clarity is an issue here.
I've arranged my comments into three groups, headed 'Philosophical', 'Stylistic', and 'Mathematical', dealing respectively with your overall system of beliefs as it appears in 'Pattern Recognition in Man and His Environment', some difficulties with the way it's written, and technical stuff on the meaning and derivation of the Neogaussian distribution.
[1] PHILOSOPHICAL
1.1 I feel there's a bias towards telecomms which affects your view of things, in same way computer people often imagine that 'bits' measure mental activity, or the brain 'is a computer'; or presumably jockeys might measure 'civilisation' in terms of the spread of livestock, horse breeding, and worldwide betting. For example, at one point you compare vision to television. But all TV does is send a rough image of something from one place to another; vision includes the process of perception itself, of understanding what's all around. Would you say a lens making an image of a scene on a piece of paper provides a model of human perception? It seems to me there's a danger that you overestimate transmission rather than comprehension.
1.2 Your claim that human beings' intelligence depends very much on 'pattern recognition' seems wrong to me. All animals recognise patterns in the sense that they can identify friends, foes, food etc. Intelligence seems to me much more abstract and high-level, possibly being dependent on language. If you reply "Well, no animals have discovered there are seasons, or night and day, or any other repeating event" this is behaviourally wrong (some prepare for hibernation, or fly off for winter, or bed down for the night), even though they have no way of recording or communicating their 'knowledge'.
1.3 The last point is dependent on another weakness, namely that you never seem to make it clear what you mean by a 'pattern'.
1.4 Moreover, your emphasis on intelligence in man, although it's a tempting idea, can be attacked quite convincingly; if man had evolved 6 inches tall, would things be the same? In fact, human beings are amongst the very largest animals. And if man were on all fours, or had no hands, or was not warm-blooded, or wasn't mobile, all these factors would make 'intelligence' almost unusable. I think you're in a position similar to insurance workers arguing whether salesmen are more important than actuaries; they both seem to be necessary. H G Wells wrote something like 'the brain of man is as much a product for the hunt for food as the snout of a pig, and may be as good for unearthing fundamental truth.' [Added later: I think Arthur Balfour wrote that]
When, as in introduction to the dominance of man, you say 'dinosaurs were dominant over all other life' this seems more of an ideological statement than anything; after all, they died out whereas other species which were barely aware of them carried on; I'm not sure they were any more 'dominant' than whales are in the sea.
1.5 I believe your comments about idealised 'circles', 'lines' etc aren't as important as you think. The word 'circle' is used to describe a more-or-less round thing; it's all very well saying it's not a 'perfect' circle, but the point is the word is used to apply to imperfect circles, so that's what circles are. I think you've got some Platonic ideas of the 'ideal' in mind which don't perhaps have much relevance.
1.6 In a similar way, you say in section 5(9) that '100% precision, objectivity and certainty (100% pattern recognition) are all impossible.' Apart from the unproven implication that precision etc are related to patterns, I think the argument is wrong. I can remember believing something similar myself, namely that we can't be sure of anything. The reply, are you 100% sure of that? reveals there's some logical flaw somewhere. To return to your claim, in 5(9), '100% precision, objectivity and certainty (100% pattern recognition) are all impossible', are you 100% sure of that?
1.7 There's a certain amount of what I take to be logical irrelevance in your evidence: the details of NHS tests, while they may reveal NHS incompetence, don't help prove your case. Another difficult example is your use of the Lorentz transformation in relativity. As I understand it, relativity is a theory which reconciles the idea of a constant speed of light with measurement; the idea is to discover a way to measure an 'interval', a constant between any two events. Lorentz, Michelson-Morley, bending light and all the rest are logically derivative from the theory, even though thy were noticed earlier, and tend to be the stock-in-trade of low quality TV programmes and so on.
1.8 In your section on 'our natural environment' you include air in the upper atmosphere, microwave transmissions, and geostationary satellites. I can remember an exhibition in Reading museum entitled 'The Natural Magic of Photography.' I think there's some imprecision there.
[2] STYLISTIC
2.1 I have to say I found it discouraging that your exposition remained almost unchanged between 1968 and 1984; surely in what is now 25 years somebody must have queried parts of it?
2.2 I think you should include diagrams to illustrate your points. For example: your illustrations of the Neogaussian distributions typically include three rectangles, which are, we gather, 'quips'. Apparently they overlap. But there's no clear indication I could see how or where they overlap or, given that they overlap, what they are supposed to mean and why the result doesn't have stepped edges.
2.3 I fear you tend to use single quotes too often, and not to show you're quoting, but to indicate you're using a word or phrase in a slang or metaphorical sense. Unfortunately this doesn't help the reader follow the sense. Let me give in double quotes for distinctness just a few, out of very many, examples:
"The 'single-values' into which a whole pattern is analysed should all be single quips."
".. all the subdistributions should have the same statistical shape at all times and at all parts of the pattern within the limits set by .. the density of quips 'at' any deviate in the distribution."
".. the 'shape' of a distribution.."
"The towns are much more 'random' and much less clearly definable than the principle cities."
".. the 'basic indeterminacy' .."
In each case, you see, the reader is left uncertain whether the word is intended in some metaphorical or Pickwickian sense or not. To take the first example: if you mean single values, why not say so? In the second example, if you mean 'the density at a deviate', why not say so? In the third, if you mean the shape, why not say so? If in each case you really mean something else, why not tell the reader what?
2.4 I fear also you employ underlinings, capitals, and parentheses in the same way as single quotes, to give an illusion of emphasis or difference, without making clear what it is you're emphasising or drawing attention to. For example, in: "When we recognise a repetitive pattern (sic) to the maximum possible extent by analysing its whole, MOSTLY repetitive, 'double' distribution.." why is 'mostly' stressed?
2.5 I hope you won't mind if I quote from a Prentice-Hall author's guide, which they hand out to their authors. A long sentence of psychological jargon is followed with: 'Does it mean anything? Possibly. Is it worthwhile finding out? Not many readers will think so.' I think, though I hope you don't mind me saying so, that some such argument might have occurred to commissioning editors faced with the typescript of 'Pattern Recognition...'
[3] MATHEMATICAL
3.1 Let me concentrate on section 1 (4) beginning with paragraphs a, b, and c after 'we can greatly simplify our analyses .. by taking three steps.'
(a) "We can analyse statistically..' examples of patterns, which apparently include handwriting. So we have: 'In a statistical analysis of handwriting, small parts of it are arranged in order of their mean magnitudes, regardless of their position in the pattern." What is the magnitude of a small piece of handwriting?
(b) ".. allow for random perturbations.. by analysing the whole pattern in 'zero-recognition' parts." What is a 'zero-recognition' part? You don't seem to say anywhere what this item, in quotes, is meant to be.
(c) ".. as an illustration of this (apparently a reference to 'zero recognition' again and random perturbations) maximum recognition of the pattern of a carpet must always be less than 100% of .. the carpet.." What does 'maximum recognition of a pattern' mean? If you recognise a pattern, how can you improve this to 'maximum recognition'? You may recall I raised this point when we talked, and you replied that carpets, being man-made, weren't a good example, but nevertheless I find the example appearing again here.
3.2 You continue "If the reader is interested in the comparatively simple mathematics involved in deriving the general solution he may find it in full in the Appendix." But this appears not to be the case; if we look at the Appendix, it starts with the sentence "In the complete distribution of quips, the deviate range, 1.0, for maximum recognition should be analysed into 100/(100-S) masked and just unrecognised parts (See 1.5), there being a +- 0.25 random quip variate range about each part (see 1.4)." It continues with free use of undefined terms: Pattern, coherent, quip, modulate, normalise, maximum recognition, unrecognisable, mask...
3.3 You seem to me to introduce assorted mathematics without sufficient proof; for example:.
Appendix page 3 you mention the standard deviation of quips. It's not clear to me whether this has the status of a parameter, as in the Gaussian distribution, or whether it's an arithmetic deduction from your distribution; it it's the latter, why should it be important?
Appendix page 4 uses a form of proof of the sort 'if sigma = .5, then sigma = .5225' and continues to work out a 'correct' sigma. There must surely be a more formally correct deduction of your parameter.
On 1(12) and Appendix 3 you talk about 'The probability of the quip'; but obviously a probability is a ratio, so the expression 'the probability of a quip' on the face of it seems meaningless, like talking about 'the probability of an ace.' There seems to be something omitted.
I think there's a conceptual error in your use of the figures quoted from Einstein for observed and expected displacements of stars during the eclipse of the sun. You have figures like observed = -.8, expected = -.9. And you conclude that the difference is 200% or so. But although this process of taking the difference and dividing by an original makes sense when there's a small change on a large value, I'm uneasy about using it here.
I'm also unhappy about the use of the square root of the sums of squares of the earth's velocity round sun and the sun against 'fixed stars' as an average velocity.
As I mentioned above, if you have overlapping rectangular distributions, I can't see why there isn't an irregular, stepped edge somewhere, as might be expected. I can't see why the leftmost part of your distribution should be a rising straight line, for that matter.
Note: On the normal distribution, there's an example in Keynes' Treatise on Probability where he deduces what he calls a law of error, i.e. a distribution, in the case where the most probable value of a quantity is equal to the arithmetic mean of the measurements, and deduces a formula of which the Gaussian form is a special case. Looking at his reasoning, I wondered whether some such mathematical deduction might be possible in the case of 'uncertainty.'
Now, as I said at the beginning of this letter, my interest is in trying to get to the bottom of this so I can think about it properly; I do hope you won't take my remarks in a personal sense. It's not so much that the separate points I've made are important in themselves; rather that I'm trying to reach out for the main idea, lurking frustratingly out of sight! Anyway, if you have comments on my comments I'd of course be pleased to hear from you. Meanwhile, assuming it's OK with you, I'll hang on to the copy I have of your typescript, and return it perhaps in a month or two.
Best wishes, Rae West.
========
[8] His reply, 18 June 91 wanting further discussion
Thank you for your letter which reached me in record time. I found it most helpful, and am very grateful for your comments. It does much to explain the reluctance of publishers to accept my book in spite of the many close agreements between deductions from the theory in it and universally accepted published measurements; but, additionally, even Einstein took 10 years and an expedition to South America to gain acceptance! Basically new ideas are never welcome to the establishment!
In our preliminary discussion, I intended to stress the great importance of treating pattern recognition quite apart from the patterns themselves.. My book is about the subconscious mental processes...
As for your initial points
1. Yes, I have, in over 30 years, received only evasive replies, or none at all. No one has said categorically "it is wrong" as yet.
2. Yes, I would very much like to improve clarity, though I doubt whether this would gain acceptance alone.
I attach my comments on yours. [Two sheets are attached, going through my points, but naturally not answering most of them, or explaining the most important part, the derivation of his statistical distribution. It ends: ..
'b. Any diagram would need to be 3-dimensional if complete. c. the apparently random quip extends over a variate range of +-25%. It masks 1.095% of the recognition range normalised to 1.0. .. I suggest your other points are best left for discussion if and when you would like us to meet again.']
Again, many thanks for your letter. Your further comments in a month or two will be welcome.
Yours sincerely, Harry Rantzen.
[9] My reply: Tue 25 Jun, 1991
Mr Harry Rantzen Rae West
=======
Dear Mr Rantzen,
Thanks for your reply to my letter; I'm glad you didn't object to it.
I'd be very happy to meet again to discuss things further; perhaps you can suggest a date, since I don't think I'll have any difficulty fitting my time around it. Just let me know when would suit you.
What would interest me most would be to have you explain the derivation of your statistical distribution, in three dimensions!, since I still haven't grasped exactly what are 'quips' and so on. The remaining points, whether true or not, all seem to me to hang on that. Perhaps we could arrange a bit more time than we managed on 11th June. If you'd prefer, we could have two sessions during one day; there are people I could see in NW2 and NW3 in between, since I used to live in your area of London. Perhaps you could pre-arrange something that your wife approves.
Another interest of mine is the idea that new ideas are never welcome to the establishment, as you commented in your reply. I'm trying to collect examples of this, and have managed to contact a few people with the same interest; if we have time perhaps we talk over this, too.
Best wishes, Yours sincerely, Rae.
[10] His reply: 14th August - See his handwritten letter; mostly concerned with a shorter version of his hearing idea, cut to 50,000 words [he seems obsessed with the number of words]. Asked me to return both his typescripts; in fact I only have one, the green-bound 'Pattern Recognition..'
[11] My reply: 28th August
- Handwritten letter saying in my opinion he should explain the derivation of his distribution. When can I return his green-bound typescript? And perhaps talk?
- He phoned and invited me round; also apologised that he'd thought I had his hearing script, whereas he'd in fact lent it to his son-in-law, Desmond Wilcox.
[12] Second meeting: Wed 4 Sep, 1991
- He was in his small room, beaming, when I came in at 10.30. [Very hot; glass doors fixed open. Man on door asked me to buzz: Wife's voice; "Hi.. the door's open" "Then come up." Up in the lift to flat 1]
- Came with Moore's statistics, Keynes, Moroney, actuarial notes on stats. Mrs Rantzen asked if I'd brought lunch. Just a joke.
- Later, she didn't like the idea of getting in touch with Catt, "Someone who thinks he's been stymied.. Oh no, I don't think so.."
- She was uncritically pleased with Esther, saying rather less about her other daughter in Australia. I think Esther went to Somerville, and mum naturally regarded Oxford as superior to Leicester. Of course she had no idea what if anything Esther had learnt there. She said Esther had written a letter to them once in Anglo-Saxon. If she went to Somerville, cp. Ann Oakley's book. Harry said her programmes aimed for the maximum audience, Desmond's for the minimum. Joke. [Both were Jews at the BBC; Esther's work inclkuded a supposed child help line. NB she thought I might be an actor, trying to get into TV]
- Harry tended to repeat stuff from last time: NPL acoustics dept; due to cuts they regretted etc/ 'See Hear', sign language organisation, Desmond Wilcox elected Patron or President, "I forget which.. I'll see him over the weekend.."/ Sunday Times, a month ago, Dr Peckham to co-ordinate NHS research.. they have their own ways of doing things etc/ [I look at his mug on a little tray: 'STC Technology Ltd. 30 years research in Harlow' in black. He tells me it's changed its name more often than any other organisation he knows of]/ Roy Jennings: did Post Office Research at Dollis Hill, now working on cardiograms at Sussex University. He seemed to think I might know him. / NPL have found the velocity of light varies.. NPL have atomic clocks.. that's what they say../ My theory predicts random variations of 25% caused by gravitational variations../ My theory predicts sunspots at 11 year intervals.. the sun.. corona.. total eclipse.. enormous upheavals../ Genes and human genomes: genes don't always work the same way.. variation through slight fluctuations..
- "46 cycles per second needed in sound, sight.. cinema projected at 48.. [you mean 24 frames, but projected 48 times, with rotating mask? - Yes].."
- HIS THEORY AND HEARING: [Now began about a 2-hour interrogation; I wanted to pin him down]
".. After a laryngectomy.. some learn to vibrate their tummy.. I dislike the term 'white noise'.. it suggests something from outside.. the ear contains a tiny channel.." [all this in his books, as I pointed out..] ".. .04 to .0175 millisecond [sic; always in that order].. all you hear is a click.. 480 traverses are needed before detail is identifiable." "So you assert. You haven't proved it." "It's in here!" "Well, you haven't proved it yet. .. Let's see where you start.." "I mean by the statistical articulation score.. just the percentage got right" "You mean to take your list of syllables, like a, an, at, cat, and just add up the proportion that are recognised? That's all?" "Yes." "OK. What's the next thing?" "Each syllable is cut up into bits and arranged in sequence." "OK. Let's see what you mean. Suppose 'cat' is the syllable. Then you might have say k er aa aa t; so you'd arrange them by analogy with alphabetical storage, a c t? Of course there'd be many more.." "Yes, that's right." "What's the next thing?" "The average power of the syllable. At comfortable listening level. That's on average about ?70 dB." "You're saying you just measure the output of each syllable, then take the average of all the measurements?" "Yes." "So you get just one figure for all the syllables?" "Yes." "OK. So we have three empirical things; you first measure the percentage that some given speaker and subject gets right; then you divide each syllable into tiny parts and arrange them; and you measure the average power?" "Yes." "Then we have to deduce the optimum arrangements that nature would have to come up with to maximise recognition?" [Beams] "That's it. When you've done all that, you find there's a new parameter - indeterminacy. No matter how clever you are.. small enough.. you can't tell the difference between noise and articulation..."
- "No [sc. Gaussian] distribution goes on forever.. it always meets the limits of indeterminacy.. It's not a smooth curve. If you go down small enough you get irregularities." "Mm, yeh. If you magnify something that isn't smooth you get unevenness" "Suppose I mention apples. Their average weight is so much. If I arrange the weights in ascending order of magnitude that is one statistic." "You mean you plot their weights?" "Yes." "OK. Here we are. This [horizontal] is weight. This [vertical] is number. What do you mean by arrange them in order?" "You have to arrange them in order of magnitude" "No you don't. Suppose this apple weighs 1.3; there it is. [Draws dot] And this one weighs 1.35; there's another dot. You don't get a curve. There are a lot of dots. [He draws histograms] You can take a range, but you don't have to. The distribution is just dots." "All statistics involves ?ranges." "No it doesn't. For example, you can have a diagram like this, with scattered dots, and draw a regression line. [He gets excited and draws dots all over the place, to show that uncorrelated dots may not be too much use] The point is you can do what you want; they're your statistics. Anyway..."
- "Do you have an optical equivalent? I want to get a better picture. I used to be interested in photography, lenses.." "When you're driving, it's hopeless to get an idea of what's going on in less than 1/10th second.." "OK. With hearing, you use a set of standard syllables. Is there an analogy with vision?" "Three or four letters in the printed word.." "Like a syllable?" "Quite correct." "OK; let's take the word c a t. What's the analogy with splitting it up into lots of tiny parts.." "You can't separate the word cat" "Well; what about a single letter? Can you have an average recognition? I presume so. And an average 'power'. But what's the analogy with splitting it into little bits?" [It became clear he couldn't think of one] ".. Isotropic.. same in all directions.. light waves.. scatter from that building .. TV set.. needs ?6 megacycle bandwidth.." "Is there any connection between the way TV works and peoples' perception?" "... with the curtain behind.. appears more dim.." "Are you talking about the whole picture, or a little do, where you mayn't be sure whether it's there or not.."
- [He looked through his green-bound volume; found an example, also in 'Uncertainty in Communication..' which was to do with an experiment with Foucault and Fresnel equipment, and sodium light with fringes of two lines on the spectrum.. ended with smooth continuous light.." "Can't you think of an example that doesn't need special equipment like spectroscopes?" "Stroboscopic illumination" "What?" "You know, wheels of stagecoaches in the cinema.." "You don't have an ordinary example?" "The eye's sensitivity varies a lot.. accommodation.. if you sit in a dark room.. but this doesn't work with ears" "I've read that people in sound proof rooms adapt.." "Have you been in an anechoic room? I have.. makes you feel deaf.. most of my voice is reaching you from the walls, by reflection.." "But in these very quiet room you can hear your eyelashes, you can hear your own digestion.." "It isn't the same. Hearing requires a comfortable level of ?70 dB.."
- [He digressed onto 'perfectly black' hollow spheres with pinhole in, and black body radiation]
- [I tried to get back:] "OK. We have sound. We have a percentage score made from a list of syllables. We have split them up and sorted them, in some way you haven't explained. And you've got the average power. What's next?" "The final and most important one: analyse in small bits where you just fail to recognise the articulation. Then you plot that.." "OK. What is it you plot? Look. [I write 'syllables: a, an, at etc.'] Subdivided at same fraction of a second. [I draw vertical bars under, to indicate cutting up into bits.] Here's another one. Strength. You're saying that's one syllable? OK. Here we are. Strength. [I draw equispaced lines vertically below that.] Right. Now here are two axes. What goes up here?" "Frequency of occurrence." "OK. I'll label it frequency of occurrence. Now what about the x-axis?" "Duration." "But it can't be duration. The durations are all the same. We've got syllables cut up into bits and sorted, and they're all the same duration. [He draws his distribution - straight line steeply from origin, then vague semblance to half of a normal distribution to the right; labels 'avge' somewhere on it. He writes '275 msec' on it. I start to get more exasperated.]
¦frequency¦ of ¦occurr- ¦ence ¦ ¦ --+------------------------------------------ ¦ Duration
OK. Look. Here's a phrase: anappleaday. We cut it up according to your rule." "So that each subdivision doesn't change more than the breath perturbation." "OK. Look. Have you got a pair of scissors?" "Oh there are lots of them." [I write in capitals: AN APPLE A DAY] "OK. Let's say there's a race of beings who only use these words. This is their complete list of syllables. Just assume that. Now say we'll subdivide them crudely. [I write something like ah aa an nn ar p p el uh d eh ay under the capitals] Now we split them into equal intervals. [I get the scissors, cut out 12 strips each with a 'syllable' on] So here we are, these are the syllables. Now you say you 'sort' them. How do you sort them? Which is supposed to come first? Do you count up all the ers, that sound just like clicks? Are you saying someone has listened to thousands of clicks and learnt to tell them apart?" [Again, I draw two axes. He does his diagram again] But this axis can't be time. All the syllables are equal length." "Yes it can" "All right. Here's 'eh'. There are two 'eh's. Where do you plot them?" [He does a sort of y=x plot, with dots, counting two across from the origin, and 2 up. Starts to mark .273 sec on the axis...]
- "Well, maybe we'll come back to that. Let's look at a few other things. Your derivation of the speed of light.. You use the square root of the sum of the sun's speed relative to the stars [sic; didn't feel like arguing over this] and the velocity of the earth around the sun.." "Lord Rayleigh said that a random walk etc" "What he said was that the distance is proportional to the square root of the time." "Well, I'm sure that's what Lord Rayleigh said!" [I get irritated] "All right. [I sketch Saturn far outside earth's orbit] Saturn must move much faster than the earth. Now, look, the earth's velocity round the sun is the larger of these two expressions, in sqrt (vs^2 + ve^2). So if Saturn is ten times as fast as the earth, the velocity of light will be much greater on Saturn." "I really don't know what conditions are on Saturn! Nobody does. I have a page of proven results.. established physical constants.. if you're not prepared to accept them then I don't know what you want.." "Well, but you seem too earth-centric. If it works with one planet it should work with another. Let's look at this [fingering the 'Supplement to Astronomical Ephemerides' or something, pinched from his Harlow labs judging by the bookplate] You deduced the earth's year should be 365 days. 365 1/4. Let's apply the same thing to Jupiter and see if it works!" "I've done Mercury, and Mars.. I really see no reason etc" "Why not? What do you need to know on your theory? .. period of rotation.." [He simply refused to go on, and in fact I was tempted to get up and leave.]
However, it was 2 o'clock and Mrs Rantzen had prepared her cold meat - beef; tongue; worryingly bright pink meat disks; with wholemeal rolls, lettuce and little tomatoes, and a grubby jug of water. There was an odd acoustic effect from wind howling locally, possibly focused by curved fronts of buildings, I thought. She seemed more chatty; I explained to her about Jarlsberger cheese and Emmentaler, made my meat into sandwiches in the manner of the famous Earl, and my theory that Hawking's [alleged] book on time only sold because of its religious references. She thought it was wonderful that a man so ?deformed 'in every way' as she put it should be religious, and should be so revered by her students [she remembered an occasion at Cambridge; she had no idea what the building was - a Senior Common Room? - which gave a misleading impression of a lofty aloofness - where she'd seen him being wheeled in and lionised by his students]. She didn't know the difference between 'astrophysics' and 'metaphysics.' I explained ['what I really mean is what is your job?'] that I didn't have one, but wasn't unemployed in the sense of drawing money... I had coffee; she didn't; then he decided he'd like some; so she thought she would too; and we sat with our mugs [theirs with inferior Matisse or Dufy style illustrations; and villainous dark liquid]. She said no doubt I'd be back. I had my 2nd pee. And said I must have parked in an unpopular parking place. What do you mean? Well it was on a corner, on a slope. I apologised for being a bit aggressive. He said no, not at all. She said she was going to watch 'The Young Doctors', which reminded her of Australia. He asked if I knew the geography of the place. I had my 3rd pee; the bathroom is one of these all-enclosed jobs, probably with a ventilator fan. She said he needed a rest. I said he should explain the derivation of his distribution. She said he was 89. I left; forgetting to thank her for her food. Walked to Swiss Cottage library in hot rather dusty Camden streets; population density high; Rantzen had said he was pessimistic, as there were "I'm told" five thousand million people on the planet. It was closed; I walked around it, across 'The Square' by the sports centre and its cafe, past the ventilators from the swimming baths, and past the Holiday Inn, crossed the complicated junction at Swiss Cottage, where Mike Todd had smashed himself up, and back to Boundary Road. Drove off to see Simon, whose first day it had been at UCS, and Alan, whose football goal needed a couple of bolts in it. {I wonder know if 'The Square' has some Freemasonry link; an earlier Barnato seems to have been murdered by Masons].
[13] Comments by others: Catt, Deans - Catt found his written style overpowering or irritating, and anyway is uneasy about statistics, or indeed anything mathematical. - Deans made some notes in a letter dated 4 Oct 1991 which is critical ['a bat with a smaller cochlea .. shorter wavelengths.. I reckon the ear does no more statistics than God plays dice with the universe'] but without bothering with Rantzen's actual book or arguments, though this is perhaps excusable, since they're very opaque. - I think I mentioned him to Hillman at Sussex, but if so Hillman just said he understood no stats.
[14] The End?/ Fellow Suppressee, Roy Jennings - ROY JENNINGS: Harry Rantzen said: Post Office Research at Dollis Hill, now working on cardiograms at Sussex University, hasn't had his results published since 1960s. Sussex Uni: 0273-606755. They said they had no record; four Jenningses, but no Roy. Post Office HQ: 071-490 2888 said only research place is in Swindon. Wrote to Rantzen for his address on 5 Dec, 1991; no reply. I wondered if his wife intercepted my letter. Probably he was ill.
[15] Letter to Royal Statistical Society
15.1 Letter
I telephoned their London office on 2 June 1993. They seem to have at least two journals, one coming out four times, the other three times, a year. They also have a monthly newsletter, News and Notes; I can get in touch to insert a letter:
Mr Ian Puzey, Correspondence Editor
Roach House
The Chase
Paglesham
ROCHFORD
Essex
[Addresses, phone number, date]
Dear Ian Puzey,
Letter for R.S.S. Monthly Newsletter.
I wonder if you'd mind printing the letter on the attached sheet below? It's prompted by this: I have a maths background with computers and some stats, and a few years ago picked up in a second-hand bookshop a volume by Harry Rantzen, who turned out to be a BBC engineer, and incidentally the father of the famous Esther. He has a theory which is nominally about pattern recognition, and which seems to combine the normal distribution and rectangular distribution, using things he calls 'quips' which represent the point at which an observer is just 50% sure that an observation is noise, or an actual perturbation. He develops this theory at some length, and in fascinating detail. I'm interested in trying to contact anyone who has reviewed or read the book, or otherwise come into contact with these ideas. His presentation is fascinating and appealing, and I'm curious to try to settle for my own satisfaction how much truth there is in them; I fear there may be fundamental flaws. I should add that I visited him a couple of times, but he's now rather old for intensive discussions.
The woman who spoke to me on the phone, and gave me your address, said there was no editorial limit of the length of letters; I find this hard to believe, and have made a best guess at the right combination of detail and brevity. I hope it's OK.
Yours sincerely, Rae West.
Dear R.S.S.,
Harry Rantzen: 'Uncertainty in Nature and Communication' (1968, Hutchinson)
This is a plea for intellectual help! I wonder if, through your columns, one (or more) of your readers could provide me with critical information about this book? Possibly someone can remember reviewing or reading it. It's by a considerably skilful communications engineer, who in essence divides the world into technologically controlled things [e.g. idealised smooth, cylindrical or flat or whatever shapes] and uncontrollable 'natural' things with their associated random perturbations. He regards the human brain as a device for pattern recognition, able to see through the perturbations, and he's developed a theory, apparently with a mathematicians's assistance, which seems to combine the normal distribution and rectangular distribution into the 'neogaussian' distribution, making use of what he calls 'quips', which represent the point at which an observer is just 50% sure that an observation is noise, or an actual perturbation. He develops his theory at some length, and in fascinating detail, and I'm curious to try to settle for my own satisfaction how much truth there is in these ideas. I believe his book met with very little response when first published.
Typical of the sorts of results he claims to have derived are, (all abbreviated to save space):
[1] Much improved hearing aid based on selective amplification of individual discrete elements of sound;
[2] Length of lunar month and earth's year;
[3] Blood temperature explained in relation to variations in ambient air temperature;
[4] Ideal height for human eyes, derived from a consideration of air density, is about the level it's observed to be;
[5] Explanation for the 4/3 rule of the earth's curvature in radio transmission;
[6] Explanation of meteorological phenomena; e.g. point where cold air from the poles meet warm air from the equator, plus cyclical effects of heating caused by earth's rotation, gives patterns in rising air determining air pressure;
[7] Some social phenomena, e.g. size of units in democracies, time-spans needed in evolution to produce recognisable changes.
I'd be grateful to anyone whose memory may perhaps be jarred by this, or who has an interest in modelling some of these aspects of the world. Feel free to contact me: Rae West
15.2 Acknowledgment
- It will be published in full in the next available issue, September
15.3 Rescheduling
- Phone message Fri 30 Jul 1993 asked to postpone my letter a month since September issue was full of letters [some on the national curriculum and testing], and mine could be more important - that's what he said! Frank Duckworth. I never saw their Septamber issue; and never had any sort of reply.
©Rae West