abskebabs

Unfortunately, I doubt it is. It is not difficult to find information about this, indeed if you would have attempted a google search you may have found some of these articles: http://www.canadafreepress.com/2007/cover031307.htm http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=54528 http://newsbusters.org/node/11149 http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/251232 Don't get me wrong, I can't blame his logic, anthropogenic climate change is probably a great means for a political wheeling dealer to extract money from the all too ready to give public for his own finances; while purchasing carbon credits to "offset" his CO2 emissions from the Generation Investment Management LLP, a company which he is founding member and chairman. Maybe this guy needs a nobel prize...

Fair enough, but what about my second question? I guess falsely profiteering while trumpeting a cause may not be hypocrisy or have the spice of a sex scandal; I still find it unforgiveable.

Correct me if I'm wrong but didn't Al Gore only do this after how much he had wasted energy was exposed? Also, didn't he pay carbon credits to a company HE owned?

I posted on these forums a few years ago links to some admittedly dubious articles and papers relating to topics regarding "wave genetics" and photonic radiation using DNA somehow between cells to coordinate behaviour and things of the sort. A lot of the work was done by just a few researchers who continuosly seemed to cite a few works of each other. At least this was the impression I gained after a discussion with one of my own professors about this work(he was pretty skeptical of photonics having any major role in molecular biology). I recently came across an article, that was linked across from somewhere Gariaev's work was discussed, from a researcher called Paolo Manzelli. Admittedly this article reads pretty nuttily as well, however; despite this and the bad english I think they might be on to something. Here's a link to the article:http://www.edscuola.it/archivio/lre/DNA-MUSIC.pdf Anyway, the bottom of the article cites a webpage detailing the history of this field of biophysics/biophotonics which is as follows: http://www.lifescientists.de/history.htm This website is hosted by an organisation called the International Institute of Biophysics. They have a summer school this August. I guess maybe part of the work in this area may have been pseudoscience or bad science. I certainly became skeptical. What do you guys think? Have I once again potted on to the world premier league of cranks?

If I understand your question correctly, I guess it is possible to concentrate heat with the use of a lens, or possibly with some kind of radiating construction approximating a blackbody surrounding the object you'd like to heat up. I guess this body could be insulated from the outside, with some convenient material. I guess the blackbody could be heated with some kind of energy source from the "inside", perhaps a chemical reaction or something of the sort, lor perhaps an electrical plug. The problem with all kinds of schemes is you have to take into account the second law, which tends to discourage all such constructions that "concentrate" heat, and ones that do would have a large entropy cost associated with them.

I guess over time, assuming our species lasts long enough, this may produce an interesting feedback mechanism between our societal development and our evolutionary process. What do you think?

I see, certainly you make a clear case with the analogy provided concerning humans living at high altitude. So you're conclusion would be even now we are subject to evolutionary pressures? I only have doubts because I can see certain technological and societal developments as perhaps having allowed us to escape evolution along a certain path. For instance, the invention of clothes allowing us to escape developing a kind of fur for habitation in cold climes. Additionally, recent technological developments allowing for the treatment of genetically based diseases, maintaining populations that would otherwise have not survived. I see the basis of you're argument, we still live in an environment, and so in some sense it must "select" who makes it to the next generation. Would you say the development of civilization has at least "shifted the goal posts" in terms of the selective pressures applied to humans?

Since my recent thread on a related subject, I cannot help but wonder the extent and nature to which as a species we may have "evolved", adapting to different environments and lifestyles since becoming homo-sapiens. In all honesty, I am not much better than an educated layman at biology, especially so evolutionary biology, so I was hoping I could get some input on these kinds of questions from people in the forum. My understanding from my school education was that biodiversity is present in human beings, though has never been significant enough, coupled with the fact that human populations have never been isolated enough from each other to allow for sub-species to emerge. Is this assessment correct, or does it require some revision, and on what grounds? Also, is it reasonable to suppose we have had selective pressures acting on us in the first place, especially in recent times(by that I mean the last 50000 years or so), with the development of a division of labour, trade and agrarian societies and civilizations. My view again, from my general education was that we were largely able to escape the environmental selective pressures prevalent to other organsms, hence stopping or inhibiting evolution by definition. Is such a view naive, or close to the mark?

I remember this topic being brought up somewhere else, and some of the conclusions and results of research I saw I did find disturbing; I guess to be brutally honest with myself and everyone on this forum it did upset egalitarian prejudices I hold dear. I'm guessing people will be aware of books like the Bell Curve by Charles Murray and the Global Bell Curve by Richard Lynn; I was given 2 further links to books on this subject, where I brought it up as follows: http://www.wspublishers.com/uhh.pdf and http://www.charlesdarwinresearch.org/reb.html I wanted to get your assessment on how sound this kind of work is, and whether we really do have to concede that there are major detectable racially determined differences in intelligence, and these are primarily herditarily based. I guess in science we must face up to the facts, regardless of whether the conclusions we reach are to our taste or not, but his has been a hard pill to swallow for me so far; as these sources have been pretty convincing so far. Statistics are sighted, with IQs ranging highest for "Orientals", next being Whites, followed by Blacks(Negroes). Indeed according to this work, the lowest measured IQs were found for Blacks in Africa(allegedly in the 70s), and in Northern America they were higher and this was concluded to be due to greater intermixing genetically and sexually over generations with the white population. I just had a conversation with my housemate about this, and he seemed puzzled the authors only identified cold climes as being the possible selective pressures to promote greater intelligence. I guess I find this depressing slightly as I myself would not consider myself to be in this "higher bracket", and the knowledge seems to have a horrible socially deterministic connoation to me. I would be very grateful for your replies.

I'm guessing you're asking about the one who was the critic. Well, I'm studying theoretical physics and both professors in question are theorists too. I actually went to see him today about projects for my final(4th year) today, and I did get the impression he does do a lot of work on Quantum and Classical modelling of certain magnetic magnetic materials, or at least sets a lot of projects on them! I'm sure he does do a lot more however, Our theory department does seem to do a lot of condensed matter, superconductivity and cold atom work too... I couldn't help but get the impression over the last few years we're very "applied" for a theory department!

Hmmm... no my lecturer actually didn't have such a non-rigorous approach and I was fully aware that [math]\psi(x)[/math] is simply the component of the state vector in the X basis, though I did use Shankar to do a lot of my revision, especially of the maths. Not sure if all my peers share the same views exactly. My impressions gained from the comments so far; it seems perhaps this was just a highly opinionated statement by one of my other lecturers. I think he favoured a somewhat more abstract and general treatment.

I was just wondering, because we spent our entire 3rd year Quantum Mechanics course using it. One of my lecturers(evidently, not the one teaching me the module!), seemed to bear a very negative sentiment towards its relevance; I asked him if anybody still uses it in Research, and he said the last person who did had a name beginning with D and ending in C... Personally, I came to appreciate the notation in the sense it provided a certain elegance and understanding of QM more broadly in terms of linear operators acting in vector spaces, as well as having to solve less cumbersome ODEs from schrodinger wave mechanics. So, was he right? Is what I've been taught within a lecture course once again redundant in today's world?

Interesting, I am increasingly under the impression that the first enviromental abuses were caused as a result of a violation, not an upholding of private property rights. For example when heavy industry first started to appear in the US during the industrial revolution, initially it was quite common for local landholders to take these companies to court about the damage or defocation to their property caused by soot, water pollution or whatever... This imposed a price on the activities these early industrialists and provided a disincentive to engage in highly polluting activities. History might have been different had this been upheld, yet the courts and the governments of the time decided to rule over the complaints of private citizens over these activities with the claim of justifying the "common good." I want to remind you that this has nothing to do with capitalism, which does not mean preferential treatment for any group, or bailouts for the rich. This much more closely resembles corporate facism, which is a system I feel does not do us any good. Unfortuantely, I feel in our current political climate we have a strong alliance between these corporate facists and well meaning but naive middle of the road socialists and enviromentalists. This history is well accounted by Walter Block, an economist currently at Loyola State University in his book: Economics and the Environment: A Reconciliation. Unfortunately it seems to be quite expensive at the moment, and in short supply, hopefully perhaps the Ludwig Von Mises institute can republish it at some point. Anyway basically my first point is that I essentially agree with you, statism has not always been aligned with "green concerns", yet "capitalism", the pejorative term used to describe a system governed by the principles of private property, voluntary exchange and no forceful compulsion has not always been against these concerns either, at least, not before it became hampered to compromise on its principles. What you are essentially talking about is Arthur Pigou's fallacy of certain things being left out as common goods to which there is a market failure. My rebuttal would be that if you remove the market and private property rights in the domain of areas like problems of pollution to the public sector, entailing a tragedy of the commons, you can barely attribute this failure to the system which you rejected. This is a common pattern I think that is inherent in the criticisms of the free market. Take business cycles for example. We essentially have a central bank setting an interest rate(essentially dictating a price on the rate of investment), lending money it creates to banks distorting the rate at which banks lend causing misallocations of capital and labour that would not have ordinarily occured under an enviroment under which consumers, lenders and entrepreneurs would have been left to produce an interest rate matching the investment required by the economy according to the collective time preferences of the participants in the economy. The distortion creates a business cycle and an artificially generated boom, until the prices offset by the central bank's lending policy are corrected and the scarcity of misallocated factors of production is realised. This ends the boom, following with the bust. This centrally planned agency and bureacracy known as the central bank effectively serves its purpose therefore, portending to be the "free market", and creating a giant strawman for all kinds of statists, interventionists middle of the road socialists and marxists to yell abuse about the failure of capitalism.

Fair enough. I guess, I wouldn't mind a free trade pact with the rest of Europe, but the rest of it seems to me like a great way for bureacrats to make an unproductive living financed by taxes and inflation. I'm also very skeptical of Green parties as they just seem to be cloaked socialists, and are more concerned like other statists of finding reasons to increase state power than consider other ways and approaches to tackle enviromental problems. I guess I can't be too harsh, they wouldn't be politicians if they didn't want to run other people's lives. The biggest incentive problem of all is that it would never truly be in their interest to solve problems, only to milk them for all their worth. I think a lot of ideas can be good in principle, but they are inherently flawed because they fail to account for human incentive problems, and laws of human action that cannot be removed. I think it's common, and an ad nauseum reflected result that when these grand plans of utopian social organisation fall flat on their ass for the interventionists to find scapegoats and cite a moral failure. It happened in the Soviet union with the plant managers and kulaks. It's happening today with the bankers and other financial services(not that they didn't play a vital role in exacerbating what's happenning). And with your comment about capitalists: If you have a state that can and does interfere in a market system it's only rational for capitalists to try and use it for their own benefit. What's more, the ones who do this would survive. Blaming our current problems on greed is like blaming an airplane crash on gravity.

Despite the fact I see this as a kind of grand excercise in futility, I've registered to vote, and will probably vote for anybody that will get the UK out of the EU, because I see it as nothing more than a racket.

I've just been revising fluid mechanics, and noticed a glaring error on the Wikipedia page for the Reynolds number. The person has obtained the Navier Stokes equations using primed dimensionless coordinates and divided by a factor to obtain the Reynolds number R, but has not included S which also should be obtained in front of the partial time derivative of velocity. S is called the Stround, or Stronal number, I'm not sure which. Does anyone know what it's called? That's actually the reason I tried searching on the net in the 1st place! Also, for future reference, how is it one can edit Wikipedia? is it an harder than ordinary Latex?

You have a point, essentially our differences arise from different judgements of relevance regarding the role or extent more "mainstream" republican groups had regarding the organisation and motivation provided for attendance in the tea party rallies. We both do not deny the fact of their involvement, and only differ on how large a factor we deem their role played, and I for one deem it fairly insignificant despite what corporate media spins it as.

Perhaps the following may shed some light on the issue. It is a short interview given by Rachel Maddow with Stephen Gordon, one of Ron Paul's former media coordinators: He addresses the issue regarding the level of involvement "FreedomWorks" has had now, and in the recent past, though their success does seem to have been decidedly negligible.

You're right he wasn't on the video, but I think ecoli's statements of Krugman's statement fairly accurately reflect what he said in the following NYT piece, no doubt the anouncer was referring to: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/13/opinion/13krugman.html In the relevant quotation from this article, Krugman says: I also very much dislike the intellectual "authority" he seems to have gained with the "nobel prize" in economics(awarded by the highly enlightened and impartial Swedish central bank of course:rolleyes:) when he babbles about how war, even the Iraq war he publicly opposed; is not bad for the economy: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/29/an-iraq-recession/?scp=1-b&sq=krugman+war+recession&st=nyt The guy has absolutely no cognition of the broken window fallacy, though I suppose he wouldn't be an interventionist if he did.

Was one of the issues that led to the American revolution the British outlawing of alternative currencies like the gold backed spanish dollar, forcing the American colonies to use some kind of paper scrip instead? Also, do you suppose the high tariffs they were charging on goods imported into the American colonies could have a much higher impact than simply ordinary taxation? I'm not really sure, I'm not that knowledgable a historian, much less an American one. You guys might want to check out the following article on the subject: http://mises.org/story/2110

This is a bit of a late reply, though I think the creator of this thread would do well to familiarise their self with Ricardo's law of association. It reveals how inequality is not the greatest evil on god's green earth, but actually still produces a situation with incentives on human cooperation, leading to the formation of society, and dare I say it; the free market! A good rendition of it is given here: http://mises.org/humanaction/chap8sec4.asp If we were all equal in every way, there would be no incentive for us to trade or cooperate with each other. Aside of the rare feelings of "love", it is my view that this would not be a sufficient basis for any meaningful form of society. Needless to say, one does not need much empirical investigation to realise this is evidently not the world we inhabit:-)

I wasn't paying that much attention, but if I was to guess I'd say around 10 to 13 was the age of the kid who tried throwing stuff at me, I aasume the others were around the same age but I'm not sure. What I should have said is a roll of binbags, not a packet. Not a threatening projectile, but it didn't seem he was throwing it out of jest. I suppose my actions to just ignore them and walk might have been a bit cowardly, but if I was to do something I didn't know what I could do that would be effective, appropriate and not get me into trouble. It's weird because I've got a place a teaching student associate so managing bad behaviour in a classroom should be something I should be able to deal with. I've had this kind of thing happen to me once before to a worse extent when I was a charity fundraiser, but again the first thing that worried me was about the trouble I could get into and partly I didn't want to dirty the charity's name. I suppose cowardice could have been a factor.

I was walking back from uni about half an hour ago, when I passed somekids loitering on the road. They seemed to be mouthing off and shouting at passers by, and one of them was throwing this pack of bin bags across the road. I couldn't really tell what they were saying, but the kid with the bin bags seemed to single me out and started throwing them at me. He tried twice and missed. I thought about doing something, but the thought just kept going through my head that I didn't want a physical confrontation. That could only lead to trouble for me, and I didn't really know what I could say to them, so instead I just totally avoided them and ignored them. The kid was pretty young and couldn't even throw very far, in all honesty I felt kind of sorry for them, like they were crying out for attention. I don't want to box youngsters in the UK in one category, indeed earlier on today I met a very nice girl wanting me to fill out a survey for her GCSE geography project, but what indeed should we do, as members of the general public if confronted with this kind of behaviour from youngsters?

Interesting how nobody here seems to have any problem with continual air strikes on foreign soil pretty much heedless of the likely collateral damage it is causing.If the strategy were so great, he'd be dead by now wouldn't he? Makes me wonder why people complain so much in comparison about russia's actions in georgia, when its own ethnic population is affected there. It just seems like double standards to me, though I'm sure somebody would criticise my view, saying I'm advocating doing nothing. I think they'd be right, I think "nothing" would be better than an aimless strategy that does more harm than good. Edit:Correction, sorry JohnB, just read your post and realised you made a similiar comment.