gcol

C.P Luke: The chines bucket/water/flowers story came to my wife via an email. Cannot find the original, but it was just padded out and literary, and must have altered much in translation. It may not have perfectly illustrated my point, but it made me wonder about the difference between axioms, aphorisms, received wisdom, proverbs etc. I found that there was a lot of crossover in definition between axioms and aphorisms. An axiom seems to be a statement that can neither be proved nor disproved, so what its use is in non-partisan political logic escapes me. A person can create an aphorism, which becomes a personal axiom, which then becomes a philosophical maxim. Who then decides which axioms should be used, which altered over time? I suggest that politically based axioms are useless fodder for a logical system. Of course (?) I dont include mathematical axioms in this unhelpful group. Also, just how many temporarily logical axioms are required to make a computerised system that caters completely for any given political situation?

Would the spacesuit be made in China? If so, I'll pass, thanks.

refering to the current situation in the U.K, I gleaned some info from a government website: ------------------------------------- Civil Partnerships: "The Civil Partnership Act 2004 came into force on 5 December 2005 and enables same-sex couples to obtain legal recognition of their relationship. Couples who form a civil partnership will have a new legal status, that of ‘civil partner’. Civil partners have equal treatment in a wide range of legal matters with married couples, including: (note "including". I dont know what else, I did not have the patience to find out.) tax, including inheritance tax. employment Benefits. most state and occupational pension benefits. income related benefits, tax credits and child support. duty to provide reasonable maintenance for your civil partners and any children of the family. ability to apply for parental responsibility for your civil partner’s child. inheritance of a tenancy agreement. recognition under intestacy rules. access to fatal accidents compensation. protection from domestic violence. recognition from immigration and nationality purposes." ------------------------------------- So let us retain the term marriage for its traditional meaning, and use Civil Partnership for anything else. As for "anything else" divorces, lets use, as does the same site, the legal term dissolution instead. Unless I am mistaken, here in the U.K. at least, unconventional partnerships seem to be reasonably catered for.

Have corresponded with a farmer in Portugal intending to use wind power to haul weights up a tower or hill, and there is a chap who drives his lorry up a hill and generates power as it runs down again. I think such systems work at small scales if you have the space, but water is more practical commercially.

I appear to have rattled Bascule's cage, for which I do not apologise. My basic premise is that pure logic and politics are incompatible. I note that others are asking, in a less combative way similar questions. Here, to illustrate a point, is a cut-down Chinese proverb/story to show that logic does not always provide the answer: A woman used two buckets to fetch water from the well. One was cracked, and lost half its load on the way home. Instead of repairing or replacing the cracked bucket, she used it for many years. One day the cracked bucket found a voice and spoke to the woman "I am grateful that you have not discarded me as useless, it would have been the logical thing to do, but why?" The woman replied: "Have you noticed the flowers growing along one side of the path, the side on which I carry you? There I sowed seeds, which flourished through your lost water. They brightened my life. Your weakness has given me strength. There are actions, benefits and consequences beyond logic". "Thank you". Preserve me from being ruled by people whose religion is pure logic. As any craftsman will tell you, chose the right tool for the job. Logic is not the right tool for the job of politics.

Very humbly, a layman question: Are we talking of an infinity of nothing, or an infinite amount of something? Both are theoretically possible, but they are surely different infinities cannot a finite amount of something occupy an infinitely large space, in which case one infinity bounds the other?

You made a statement that, even to me, is blatantly at odds with the coverage in my newspapers and TV. I looked for a context and it was not obvious. Your indignant squeal of "strawman" is a misuse of the term.

Governments may publicly state that they dont negotiate, but they do it through deniable third parties, sometimes tacitly encouraging special interest groups with private funds. Believing otherewise is naive. Swallowing that line of propaganda can cause serious credibility indigestion. That is the way of real politics.

Me too.

The question is simplistic and, forgive me, puerile. Define best: If you mean the most efficient, then dictatorship is a strong contender. If you mean compassionate and caring, well, we all have our illogical beliefs on that. There is no one defineable logic in human nature (example: child vs. chimp). I suspect Bascule's version of logical is whatever agrees with him, I hope therefore he would regard me as illogical. If axioms can change, they are therefore false, and therefore illogical. All present governments use axioms, most obviously the one that says "do what we must to retain power. My basic opinion is that there never has been one iota of logic in government, the beast is incapable of it, the two mutually destruct. Matter/anti-matter.

Paying for it is so cheap, tacky and defeatist! Buying 2nd hand is acceptable, but 102nd? Yuk.

Leads me to enlarge on Dak's first category: For some people, the pursuit of selfish pleasure is their prime motivation. They probably see a living sex object as a step up from an inflatable doll. Perhaps all potential and actual rapists should get a super lifelike blow-up robotic type as therapy?

Yes, a self-professed "true believer" is a dangerous animal. Atrue believer with gun in hand is a murderous maniac of the worst kind, and utterly implacable. Interesting though how Hezbullah has refined the art of guerilla war to new levels of effectiveness against traditional forces, especially by screening its combatants with civilians to play the attrocity card.

South Africa is not the only country to have grave doubts about the long term environmental effects of GM crops. Here in the UK the debate heatedly continues. Our gloriously open and honest government has changed the rules so that GM crops can be grown in relative secrecy, because now a grower has only to notify an adjacent farmer within 30 metres. Some of us see GM as less than an effort to reduce possible future food shortages and more a race for Seed grower profits by locking in gullible growers to high price seed. The dangers of cross-contamination and reduction in biodiversity have not been sufficiently addressed and investigated. There is, in my opinion, a powerful multinational long term plan to force GM on us by hook or by crook. I suspect more crook and less hook.

I have made some cells using Al, Cu, NaCl, and NaOH. To each 2litre electrolyte capacity cell I occasionally add 5ml of NaOH at 10% concentration to depolarise the Al and boost the voltage from about 600mv to 1,25v (at a steady 40ma per cell for about 50% voltage drop) to charge nicads. A fair amount of hydrogen is produced, depending on the current draw. I was considering collecting the hydrogen as an energy by-product, but the additional "engineering" is rather fiddly. If I work the cells with no NaOH, I still generate apreciable hydrogen, so NaOH is not strictly required. When the cell needs "rejuvenating", a white gell that hardens in air forms on the aluminium. A little NaOH removes this, a white precipitate falls to the bottom of the cell, and away we go again. As a matter of interest, not all aluminium is pure. Drink cans for example, and some aluminium food trays, are alloys and produce varying colours and types of precipitates and flocculants that settle out at different rates.

So veggies are inherently low on calorific nourishment? Now that gives a whole new meaning to junk food. Filling up with non-calory stuff should produce hypoglycaemic problems, no? I often stave of hunger pangs with coffe, until I realise I am feeling a bit faint through low blood sugar, and pig out on a couple of Mars bars.

Oh, woe, I hoped I had humanitarian values, and now you have dragged what was a nice friendly word down into the gutter of mass murder and general mayhem. Dammit, I shall have to find another word.

I cannot honestly think of an earthly candidate, and I was guilty of going off-topic by widening the search area. I realise I was thinking of a previous thread to do with dinosaur intelligence, and the general idea that it was not reasonable to judge other species' intelligence only by our own narrow measurement system. Tongue in cheek, perhaps, I wondered if an intelligence test designed around dolphin attributes might show that, by their standards, they were more intelligent than us. Sometimes I like to be plain awkward.

Our measure of intelligence is anthropocentric, and skewed towards manipulating numbers, strings of alpha characters, and a test of vocabulary. It does not assess morality, ethics, unselfishness or humanitarian coexistence, probably because we cannot agree how these desirable properties can be quantified, tested and codified. An intelligence test that included such attributes might well not place us so highly. An extra-terrestrial species that placed emphasis on these traits might well have concluded that we should be left alone until we had grown up and acquired a better sense of values. Interfering in other cultures here on earth has seldom, in my opinion, reaped mutual benefits. Not the right kind of intelligence, surely.

Could you put that another way, such as "The shape of light depends upon which parameter and property you are considering, and the range at which you are considering it?" Tell me the shape you want, and I will choose the parameters that achieve it.

As a layman, I see it as a "fudge" or "fiddle factor", But I quite understand why physicists want to call it something else. The politics of physics needs politically correct terms, as much as any other industry.

Is there not a poll option missing? The one that offers "Could not give a damn".

The tower of babel must have been a fun place to live, probably why it was destroyed. So much easier to control and censor when everyone is shoehorned into the same dumbed down language.

Metaphors, parables, allegories and satire are all time honoured devices to shine light on absurdities. Politics being arguably the most absurd human activity, metaphors are particularly apt except when a well-aimed one makes your own political prejudices look stupid.