Inviolability of Telegraphic Correspondence (1879) | Hacker News Reader

Inviolability of Telegraphic Correspondence (1879)

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29 pointscokernel10 comments

There's a lot of stuff that has happened in the past couple of years that proves to me that history is not necessarily a monotonic increase in state across a number of measurable parameters, there are a ton of cyclic elements. Some of those cycles are sinusoidal (pendulum like phenomenon) and some are of the sawtooth variety (slow rise with eventual crash).

In 1879 the world was ahead of us in some ways and behind in many others, if we're not careful then we may end up behind 1879 in many others as well.

Re: Sinusoidal vs Sawtooth patterns, in fourier analysis a sawtooth is just a bunch of sinusoids with the phase aligned. I wonder if these sharp transitions just occur when many factors with different frequencies happen to align in phase. 1848 and 1968 come to mind as years when this seems to have happened.

In Fourier analysis, everything is just a bunch of sinusoids ;) And it seems to me that there are also sawtooth patterns that aren't clearly the alignment of lots of sinusoidal patterns, such as market bubbles.

There are definitely graphs that can only be approximated by Fourier methods (such as square waves). The issue is related to Gibbs phenomena: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbs_phenomenon

You're correct; I was thinking of L^p (p > 1) convergence almost everywhere.

The emphasis was supposed to be on the part with the phases being aligned (at the point of the steepest slope) :)

Heinlein's 'Year of the Jackpot' is a rumination on this topic.

Thank you for tonights reading :)

Edit: wow, that was quite a story, thank you again...

This analysis was written by Thomas M. Cooley, who was Chief Justice of the Michigan Supreme Court at the time. It was mentioned in passing in a Guardian article discussed here recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10401416

The first page is here: https://archive.org/stream/jstor-3303981/3303981#page/n1/mod... Not sure why the link shows the final page as the thumbnail.

Blocked in China: the irony.

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