Questions on African Fractals ch 9-10

1) pp. 147-148 What is the difference between African and European attitudes toward the concept of infinity?

2) p. 148 How are snail shells used as icons for infinity?

3) pp. 148-9 What is the significance of the Nankani snake icon?

4) pp. 149 How did the Fang view of God contrast to that of the Christian view?

5) pp. 151-152 Why examine analog computing in regard to Africa? What is the difference between analog representation and digital representation?

6) 152-153 Explain analog computing using fig 10.1

7) 152-153 Explain analog computing in neural nets using fig 10.2

8) 152-155 How did Kolmogorov and Chaitin define complexity?

9) 154-155 What is wrong with the Kolmogorov-Chaitin complexity measure? How did scientists in the 1980s go about developing a new measure?

10)158-159 How does the behavior of cellular automata help define computational complexity?

11)Explain 1/F noise using figure 10.7.

12)159-161 Explain computational complexity in human cognition and simple physical systems.

13)161-162 How did linguistic confusion illuminate an interesting cultural connection in the physics lab at University of Dakar?

14)162-163 Why did the author think that the use of a cellular automaton model for African settlement architecture would be useless? Was he right?

15)164 Was the spiral shape of Mlomp completely unconscious? Was it completely planned?

16)164-165 How did the Jola funeral ritual help explain how something could be both bottom-up and intentional?

17)166-167 Explain 1/F noise in the Lukasa.

18)166-169 What is the relationship between complexity and feedback loops?

19)166,170,174-175 How does the use of feedback concepts in African knowledge systems resemble those in computational complexity?

20)176 With all the mathematical concepts and practices that we have found in African knowledge systems, why not simple conclude that Africans knew about fractal geometry?