OptimisticCynic

To recap: Most evolution occurs in times of plenty. During times of plenty, more of the in-between mutations survive to reproduce. Plentiful resources allows the more complex combinations of mutations more time and space to develop viable forms. During times of plenty, genetically varied individuals of a species are able to travel further and have better odds of finding a habitat that their variations suit better. This wandering around looking for a situation that is a better fit tends to bring individuals with the same or similar characteristics together in places where they are more likely to successfully proliferate. It also tends to separate groups with disparate characteristics. Hypothesis: The scrub jays of Santa Cruz island produce offspring with variations in bill length. Those with longer bills will move to the pine forests. Those with shorter bills will move to the oak forests. The birds select their habitats while they are still juveniles. Then they stay in their selected habitats as adults and breed there. http://www.wired.com/2015/03/jay-evolving-weird-way/

swansont, When you challenge me to do a better job of supporting or defining my contentions, I feel peevish. I thank you for your hard work and request that you keep it up! A "low pressure" situation is a situation wherein difficulties that threaten the lives of somewhat less optimally suited individuals are reduced. It's all relative. I do not see an objective way to define "low" or "high" selective pressures. The closest objective measure I imagine would be above or below the average mortality rate, as measured over a many generations long period, of immature individuals. The low, or reduced, stress situation would have to continue over multiple generations to enable variations to combine as I've suggested. Puppypower mentioned migrations to different environments as a possible mechanism for reduction in selective pressures. The apple maggot fly adaptation might be called a migration. I really do not see species like the maggot flies as likely to provide good examples of this low pressure evolution because of the boom and bust nature of their life cycles. A better example might be found in a population of sheep which is outgrowing its territory and has a lot of unclaimed territory to expand into because of more rain than there used to be. Those sheep with more wool would tend to migrate toward cooler territories while those with less migrated to warmer territories. More migrations to new territory will succeed when the conditions between optimal territories are better able to support the migrating animals (during good years). In such a case, it is the genetic variation which pressures the population to separate. This is opposite to the idea of external factors pressuring the animals to change genetically. Going back to the apple maggot flies, there would have been, in the original population, some flies which found both hawthorns and apples to be acceptable places to lay eggs. Others would find only hawthorns acceptable. Those which found hawthorns unacceptable did not lay eggs. Then a new option appeared and some flies which would not lay eggs on hawthorns had an acceptable place to lay their eggs. The selection pressure against these specific flies disappeared and they became numerous enough to "suddenly" appear.

Okay Sensei, Clocks are designed for consistency. Any oscillating motion includes changing accelerations and/or velocities. The same consistency can be achieved by measuring the distance traveled by an object moving at a constant velocity. Yet consistency is not a requirement for our perception of time. Consistency is only necessary for repeatable measurements that more or less correspond with our perception of time. We perceive changes. Without perceived changes, our feeling of time passing goes away. I would take this so far as to say that without changes, we go away. I think that daedalus' theory is pretty cool, and wrong. This is mostly because it leaves some things unexplained. Thus, my previous questions. If this explanation is as weak for you as it appears to me, I will try again when I am more awake.

swansont, The entire post was fast and loose. This is not my area of expertise by a long shot. That said, here is an article supporting me, http://www.wired.com/2015/03/jay-evolving-weird-way/ A ways down in the article, there is mention of apple maggot flies having diverged into hawthorn tree eaters and apple tree eaters. Should one of those divergent groups diverge again, to take advantage of a different niche, that would support my contention that multiple stage evolution occurs in low pressure situations. For examples from the geologic record I present this excerpt --from Paleontology article in Wikipedia-- During the Permian period synapsids, including the ancestors of mammals, may have dominated land environments,[75] but the Permian–Triassic extinction event 251 million years ago came very close to wiping out complex life.[76] The extinctions were apparently fairly sudden, at least among vertebrates.[77] During the slow recovery from this catastrophe a previously obscure group, archosaurs, became the most abundant and diverse terrestrial vertebrates. One archosaur group, the dinosaurs, were the dominant land vertebrates for the rest of theMesozoic,[78] and birds evolved from one group of dinosaurs.[74] During this time mammals' ancestors survived only as small, mainly nocturnalinsectivores, but this apparent set-back may have accelerated the development of mammalian traits such as endothermy and hair.[79] After theCretaceous–Paleogene extinction event 65 million years ago killed off the non-avian dinosaurs – birds are the only surviving dinosaurs – mammals increased rapidly in size and diversity, and some took to the air and the sea.[80][81][82] Back to the fast and loose again; I used 'archaeological' which is not the correct term. I think 'geological' record is more correct. Consider two ends of a spectrum of genetic diversity within a species. If hard times applied pressures sufficient to eliminate the population in the middle of that spectrum, the groups on the ends might vary sufficiently to be classified as separate species. Or, after a second or third cycle of good times expansion and diversification of both populations followed by hard times pressures, there would very likely be clear speciation. puppypower, I suspect that the human species is less likely to have long separations of groups because we will, quite literally, go out of our way to interbreed.

The Red Queen hypothesis misses my point. In unchanging conditions of low stress, more complicated variations can arise. In changing or high stress conditions, only simple evolutionary changes are likely to occur because intermediate mutations die too quickly. Compare genotype (simpe) vs phenotype (complex) changes. fiveworlds, Yes, it doesn't always work out for the better.

Hey swansont, would you please be more specific as to what is wrong with my statement and maybe include a reference or two? Call me weird all you like, but I rather enjoy figuring out how I got something wrong. After reading further through the posts on this topic, I apologize for my sound bite. I claim inexperience with the forum leading me to respond to only the first page of posts. I still haven't read all of this topic's posts, so this may have already been covered, but I have questions. How do you explain reflection? How does a photon oscillate within itself?

Thank you for further defining your terms, 'pleasure' and 'pain'. Could you perhaps expound on "optimistic thoughts and experiences'? Consider that mentally reliving an event from memory triggers the same hormonal responses as the actual event did. If the hormonal response system is malfunctioning, ie anhedonia, then the reliving of a pleasurable event would not trigger any pleasure hormone response. This supports your theory. And, People have reported their emotional state changing faster than the hormonal responses can react. The reaction time of emotionally triggered hormones has been researched. (I'm too lazy to look up the specifics.) It appears that the hormones come out after the emotion appears in the thinking. This suggests that there is more to emotional states than the hormonal responses. I suggest that our thinking selects our chemical emotional responses. I don't know the mechanism. If my thinking selects the pain or pleasure response, then my anhedonia could be caused by my thinking. Or it could be a physical or chemical problem. This is only helpful in that it is quicker and easier to change thinking than the other possibilities. A good psychiatrist will check all of the possible causes. By the specified definitions of pleasure and pain, this has no bearing upon your theory. It may have some relation to the "jamming sensation" you mentioned. When you have a remote control car that is not working right, you check the car first or you check the remote control first. Checking both together is not the first step. Whether I am deluding myself, in thinking that I am feeling pleasure when my body is not activating the pleasure response, seems like a third step question to me. Then I have to decide whether I consist of my thinking, or my body, or the combination of both. (That argument belongs in the philosophy forum.) Given multiple subjects subjected to a pure tone, such as middle C; the subjects will stop registering the sound as pleasant and instead register it as painful as the volume of that tone is increased. They will do this at different volume levels. If identical twins react to the tone as painful at different volume levels, it would tend to support the hypothesis of pleasure and pain being subjective. Identical twin sets always reacting to the tone with pain at the same volume would tend to support the hypothesis of pleasure and pain being objective experiences. --This, uncomfortably, brings up the thought of experiments performed at Nazi concentration camps.-- I do not know if any of this is helpful to you, but it was fun for me to think about. Thanks

On Wikipedia, the article, "Leukocyte extravasation" is a starting point.

There is much talk of evolution occurring as a result of survival pressures. Yet the places where the greatest biodiversity can be found are the places where the living is easy, compare the Amazon to the Arctic. I contend that most evolution occurs in places and times of plenty. The basis for this contention is that during times of plenty, more of the in-between mutations survive to reproduce. This allows the more complex mutations and combinations of mutations to develop viable forms. These viable forms may gain significant survival advantages over the old forms. The new, more viable, forms then become the pressure that kills off the old forms. One advantage to this view of evolution is that it does not require specific environmental factors to guide the selection of intermediate mutations. No purpose or goal is required, unlike the solutions from evolutionary computing. I challenge everyone on this forum to contest my contention. It took me a few minutes (after years of reading for curiosity) to come up with this. How long will it take you to accept it? Hypothesis: More mutations will be found, living, among populations during good times than during lean times. This requires controlling for lean times that occur from circumstances that do not specifically cause mutations. Hypothesis: More diversification of populations occurs in places and times when competitive pressure for resources is lower. The archaeological record supports this. More new species developed soon after major disasters than during the competitive times before the disasters. To extend the hypothesis: the same sort of effect can be seen with reductions in other types of survival pressures upon a species. P.S. Remember, "You are doing the job right only when you are having fun in the process!"

Good thinking! I have not seen the Golden Ratio applied to this before, but it seems like it could apply. Check out "Spaced repetition" on Wikipedia for other people's findings on the subject.

For a different experience of psychology, check out "The Focusing Institute" www.focusing.org . Note that psychology and psychiatry are not the same thing. Focusing is different in that they know what works. They learned it from patients who succeeded in getting better. In my opinion, they still do not know how or why it works. If you are like me, you won't care whether their explanations make sense, just so long as you get real results from the practice. Psychological research has shown that investigating origins of dis-ease does not lead to cures for that dis-ease.

Maximum sharpness of a metal is determined by how thin the edge can be. Theoretically this is determined by the size of the atoms or molecules. There is also the factor of the minimum wedge angle, which is determined by the angle(s) at which the atoms connect. More practically, the grain size determines the size of the edge. This is why different treatments of the same metal can result in different degrees of sharpness.

It has been shown already that one man's pain is another man's pleasure. From this previous research we can deduce that pleasure, or emotional reward, is relatively independent of actual physical experiences. The "empty and meaningless shapes, sounds, and images" that make up direct experience are associated with previous experiences to establish their values within the individual brain. This suggests, to me, that deliberately seeking to become aware of all of the associations in your memory that can be connected to the experience of the present moment, may activate the part of your brain where values are recorded. Some change in your anhedonia may result. It is up to you whether you wish to experiment with it or not.

White blood cells move through tissue frequently. It is not like the intestinal wall is a solid structure. There is much flexibility to the cell walls and the material binding the cells together is not stiff like dry mortar in a brick wall. I seem to recall reading something about stem cells moving through tissues on their own during certain stages of fetal growth?

This reminds me of the adage, "Better to remain silent and appear a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt." " There are many more mechanisms that clocks use to measure time, such as oscillations as provided by crystals, but the point is that they are all based on mechanisms that oscillate. Oscillation in itself is motion and, more specifically, it is motion that repeats with a specified frequency. It is because time can only be measured with motion that motion must be inherent in time. " Yes, time is measured with motion. However, it may be more accurate to say that all clocks measure distance traveled. The distinction being that distance is a characteristic of all dimensions and thus no fourth dimension is needed to explain it.

"I believe there is a way to visibly see atomic geometry with the human eye." The way to see atomic geometry with the human eye is to look at crystals. reference crystallography

Predictions: Three dimensional objects are easier to distinguish than two dimensional objects. This is because the edges of three dimensional objects change more with very slight changes in viewpoint. The changes in viewpoint are generally the result of the body and eyes being in motion. A string of neurons responding to two input pulses will, at some point(s) along the string, show a response indicative of the two input pulses interfering additively or subtractively. At present I have no evidence from neuroscience. There are practices in image processing which correlate to the concept of iterative interferometric processing. Today, upon using different search terms, I came across a "Compressed sensing" article in Wikipedia. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_sensing) This article includes math which, if I understand it correctly, does nearly the opposite of what I am suggesting happens in the brain. It takes a sparse signal and, with iteration, reconstructs the full signal. I am talking about taking a complex signal and, with iteration of the inputs, extracting the important information and compressing it for ease of further processing. I did not include in my original post any of my thinking on how further processing, also iterative, develops worldviews and thoughts. If this part is disproved, my whole construct collapses. So far, I have been unable to find any evidence against it. Experiment: Observer in dark room with objects all same color as background of room. One eye. Head stabilized to maintain steady viewpoint. Strobe of less than 1/60 second duration. Strobes separated by longer intervals, perhaps two seconds. Place strobe light directly in line with observers viewpoint. How many flashes does it take for observer to identify objects? Next, introduce slight changes of viewpoint by shifting head stabilizer between flashes, perhaps 0.5-1 millimeter shifts. How many flashes does it take for observer to identify objects? Prediction is that shifting viewpoint will reduce number of flashes required. A variation uses images painted on a flat surface in similar shades of a color. This is similar to the tool astronomers use that switches their view back and forth between two photos taken at different times. Any differences between the photos appear to blink.

You are invited to shoot this duck (hypothesis) down. perception noun (AWARENESS)› [U] an ​awareness of things through the ​physical senses , esp. ​sight thing noun (OBJECT)A1 [C] used to refer in an ​approximate way to an ​object or to ​avoid ​naming it: object noun [C] (THING)› a thing that can be ​seen, ​held, or ​touched, usually not a ​living thing:Distant objects ​look ​blurry to me. --from the Cambridge Dictionaries Online-- Perception, as I use it here, is: the differentiation of sets or arrangements of stimuli as objects. One can be said to be aware of something when a sensory stimulus is received from that something. To perceive some thing is to differentiate that thing from everything outside of it. Hypothesis-- The differentiation of sets or arrangements of stimuli as objects in a (human?) mind occurs when: multiple stimuli, received from slightly varying viewpoints, combine within the structure of the nervous system to form "ringing artifacts" (a term from signal processing). Those artifacts are differentiated as objects. Ringing artifacts occur naturally when multiple exposures are combined. I expect that most, if not all, of the information necessary to distinguish an object from its background is available within those artifacts. This information is highly compressed compared to the raw inputs. This compression reduces the load for further processing (thinking). The creation of a ringing artifact occurs very rapidly. Only a very few exposures, or views, are required to differentiate most objects. Additional views produce more accurate and precise differentiation of objects. Request-- Will somebody please help me translate this into Mathematics? I do not know enough math to do the job. I realize this hypothesis is probably wrong as stated. The purpose of a duck hunt is to have fun while identifying what is wrong with an idea so that many false paths can be eliminated. Sometimes it is, "Back to the drawing board!" when a duck is shot down and enough is left of it to cook up a better idea. At other times the best response is, "Next!" when a duck is completely shot to pieces. If you cannot shoot the duck, you can salt its tail. Improvements or evidence supporting the idea count as salt and seasoning. Enjoy.

The filter circuits, that I know of, in electronics are feedback loops. Feedback loops give results very different from reflection. The Yagi-Uda antenna is an excellent example. Thank you, waitforufo. I notice that the Yagi itself is a filter, since it has a narrow frequency range. The directional effect of reflection from elements of slightly varying lengths could lead to single location spikes of interference within a network. Has anyone seen this happen, perhaps within a wired computer network, where one node of the network has an otherwise unexplained interfering signal? This could change drastically with small changes in the wiring. I was thinking of 180 degree phase changes along a linear array producing 90 degree changes in the path of information through a network. Now I see that even phase changes of small degree could lead to an input being modified and routed differently within a network. This makes the variety of possible results more complicated while simplifying the actual physical construction of the network. Natural selection loves taking advantage of that kind of thing.

Jacket, with hood, wind resistant, sun blocking material. The jacket is worn with the sleeves secured close around the wrists, tied close around the waist, and with the hood opening pulled close around the face. It would be good to have a hood with a built in sun visor. It may be necessary to secure the waist of the jacket to pants. Fan and power in a box at the waist such that the fan blows air into a flexible hose, or multiple hoses. The hose(s) directs air inside the jacket, perhaps at the small of the back. The jacket inflates when the fan is turned on. This separates the jacket from the skin to increase its shading effectiveness. The air exits through the small gaps at waist, wrists, and face. The moving air is thus kept close to the skin and blows out over exposed skin areas. Wearing a cotton t-shirt under the jacket is recommended. This system allows much freedom of movement and efficient use of the fan blown air. With this inflated jacket, you should be able to keep cool up to quite high humidity. At 100% humidity, it will not help. Unfortunately, you may feel cool, but you will not be seen as cool. More of a clown effect at first glance. Be prepared to explain yourself often. Convince others by letting them try it out in the hot sun. Other negatives may include: wind in your eyes, noise of blown air interfering with hearing things around you, reduction of peripheral vision, increased snagging. Please tell us how it works out.

At 30 meters depth the high frequencies will be reduced. The pressure of the liquid against the speaker membrane will likely tear the membrane. It would be very easy to overdrive the speaker in liquid. If the speaker survives, at 3 m depth you might get reasonable fidelity, but not at 30 m.

Dreams are as real as any other experience humans may have. That said, I would not expect much from the presented dream. Nor would I base my life upon lessons learned from watching "reality" TV. This sounds similar to pyramid power, only faster and stronger.

Reflection of signals within the circuitry is generally considered to be a bad thing in radio electronics and computer hardware. I suspect that there are some very interesting applications to be discovered that involve intentional reflections of an input signal. Full and partial reflections, linear, 2D, & 3D reflections both open and within a network all deserve consideration. For a simple start, let's determine the frequency of a sine wave signal by using a linear array of amplitude detectors. The signal enters at one end of the array and is reflected back through the array from the other end. At some point along the array, the reflected signal will interfere with the incoming signal, for frequencies within the range of the apparatus. Which amplitude detectors along the array show the highest and lowest spikes tells us what the frequency of the incoming signal is. Possible variations abound. The reason I give this example is because it seems to have some correlation to the circuitry within biological brains. Jumping ahead and sideways several steps, I ask for input from people familiar with the neural type microchips presently being studied. How much effect does additive and subtractive interference from signals reflecting in different directions at branches in the circuitry have on the way inputs are processed within the neural circuits? Backing up to interferometry; what kind of patterns do multiple digital input signals form as they reflect within a network? Please help me find examples of the use of reflection of signals within the detection apparatus. Plus any thoughts you might have on reflective interferometric signal processing? Thank you for exploring with me.

You got me on that pzkpfw. Now to state the obvious as I love to do; every good lie contains some truth. So what physics truth can we find in Nagel's latest venture?

You might try a visible light trick. When you use a colored gel filter, of the correct color, the mineral you are looking for will stand out in comparison to the surrounding minerals. You would have to experiment with different colored filters to find one that works for what you want to do.