We Are All ...

Bosons. At least our whole selves are.

There are two fundamentally different types of elementary particles: fermions and bosons. A fermion has intrinsic spin in half integral amounts: 1/2, 3/2 and so on. A boson has integral intrinsic spin: 0, 1, 2 and so on. Intrinsic spin is the angular momentum of the particle's intrinsic self, which is a point of infinite smallness. What causes it and what that spin "is" fundamentally is not known. For now, it just "is". It's quantized in multiples of 1/2 and it is conserved.

Fermions and bosons have extremely interesting, different properties in their aggregation. We, after all, aggregations of elementary particles, so their properties of aggregation are important.

No fermion can be in the same state, place and time and otherwise, as any other fermion. They just don't like being close to each other. They repel each other. Contrapuntally, bosons love to be in the same state. They gladly lie on top of each other [ no sex jokes, please ;) ]; they can be stacked on each other in huge numbers barring other repulsive forces.

Our world exists as it does because of the fermion repulsion: without it atoms would collapse.

Light photons are bosons: that's why light's intensity in a beam can increase on and on to extremely high levels. The photons are being stacked onto each other.

What does this have to do with humans ? I'm borrowing it allegorically to describe human natures and our history through space and time.

We are bosons by our natures. Humans form communities, social organizations, towns, cities, and nations. The history and path of these organizations tend to stick together and flow though space and time like a river.

Yesterday I was working hard on my German. German is a bit odd for an Indo-European language. The grammar of Latin is closer to Polish than it is to German. Many German verbs oddly change internal vowels in tenses other than the present. The ending on their adjectives and articles have irregular endings. Germans word order is weird. Why ? In my opinion, German got heavily modified by whatever language the original inhabitants of that part of Europe had BEFORE the proto-Germans moved in (maybe 4,000 years ago or more). For all that Nazi "racial purity" bs, German is a very, very impure mutation of old Indo-European.

Both Latin and Polish are much purer descendants of old Indo-European. I joke that Polish is mostly Latin grammar with all the words changed.

About 2,001 years ago, the Roman legions of Varus were wiped out in the battle of the Teutoberg forest by the German tribes led by Arminus. That ended the Roman effort to conquer the Germanic tribes in what is now Germany. If the Romans had won and stayed, the German language today would be a lot more like French or Italian than like modern German. And I would have a lot easier time learning it.

That single event cause the "river" of Germanic history, language and culture to flow separately from the rest of the Roman empire. Without it, the German river would have merged with that of Gaul (France), Spain and Italy. The Franks who later took over Gaul were a Germanic tribe. As were the Visigoths who took Spain. But so many of the existing sedentary peoples had lived centuries under Roman rule that their original Celtic languages changed and merged with Latin, making old French, Spanish and Italian. The Germanic of the invading Franks, Visigoths, and Lombards was mostly lost over time, overwhelmed by the vulgar language of the mass of common sedentary people.

The then separated German river flowed on its own path. The German langauge remained and evolved from its older mutant form. And I suffer daily studying it.

Markets

More up yesterday. At the prodding of a commentor yesterday, I looked at some charts. To me, the market is going where I had thought it would last fall, but took an extra six months & a twist/turn that threw me off: a "return to normalcy" pricing of around 1200 on the S&P.

The Nasdaq and Russell 2000 are getting closer to their old highs as they did not have the heavy financial ("fins") weights. The effective zeroing of many fins is making the S&P and Dow look worse than indices without fins. The transports back that up, too. All those are at levels that I don't want to have any more than a "normal" long positions. I still am expecting a big pullback "soon". Krypto will be "some" equities selling every few % up, adding to cash for now.

PS: Krypto checked the portfolio this morning and then told me to sell some Pacific stock index funds & put the money in cash. The Pacific funds were 5% over their standard allocation, trigger the sell. Good doggie ... here's a biscuit.

Word of the Day

"Sodality" - noun [$10]
Sodality means a confraternity or association, especially a Roman Catholic religious guild or brotherhood.
Sentence: Toqueville in his famous book, Democracy in America, written circa 1840 and based on his travels in the United States, noted the plethora of clubs, fraternities, sodalities and other social organizations that its citizens formed and joined. In other words, he observed and remarked on our highly bosonic natures. Presumably, that nature in Americans was significantly more than existed in Europe at the time. American social mobility was at work.