Norman Albers

There are several layers to these considerations, and I am just getting my thoughts straight also. I only recently remembered or realized that heating my home with local firewood, easily available from a steady-state (sustainable) naturally watered hardwood forest, is carbon-neutral. Thus even when I tire of the physical effort this takes I might hire younger people to do the hard stuff. (I love my electric garden cart!) In the large picture, consider three distinct levels: 1) producing energy by fossil fuels; 2)living a carbon-neutral existence by harvesting fuels from the biosphere; 3) living with no intrusion at all in the carbon cycle by other sources. Maybe Psycho has reason to argue that we could never produce enough in the second scenario. If not then I will agree with him that we must go to the third. There are further second-order confusions to get straight. I asked last summer about neighboring vineyardists with many acres of cane cuttings to dispose of. They are difficult to handle and easy to burn. What is the difference between shredding and composting them, or burning? If we agree they would break down and liberate their carbon in 2-3 years, then after that span of time it would make hardly any difference what we had done. It is only a transient addition. Is it worth trying to add up transient gains?

Lockheed, I agree mostly with your analysis!!! The question is, can we be strong enough to bring forth some beauty and love in this chaos? I have squawked on this planet for 58 years. Until the day I go out feet first I will fight the Bureau of Land Management against clearcutting of the forests above me, and there are several other eternal struggles. I can see death as a sweet release. In the meantime, listen to the other kindly pieces of advice offered in this thread. Get with that path wherein you find possibilities of being a strong force for what you consider goodness.

Psycho you are hung in a loop of false logic.

Lakmilis I think you misinterpret me! I am not arguing significantly with you, but it is necessary to thoroughly understand the Schwarzschild solution before tackling the Kerr rotating source metric. I am just now completing my running of the Lense-Thirring analysis. I had to learn to crawl before walking here. Was it you who laid this term on me??? There is nothing easy about laying out and understanding all of this tensor analysis. If you can discuss degenerate metrics and the Kerr mathematics with me I will appreciate it. How much work has been done with the vision I have expressed? I am working with relativity at the particle scale. There, electromagnetics and spin greatly out weigh gravitation per se, but the synthesis I seek shows these as well as polar effects like Ahoronov-Bohm, as manifestations of a common source.

I agree with your point about taking land out of food production. I think you miss the point about growing fuel rather than taking sequestered hydrocarbons out of the earth. This is a large step.

Farmers working with the USDA grew and monitored production of switchgrass which can now be broken down to yield alcohol. They state in Sci.Am. that biorefineries are now being built. They offer the figure of 540 percent more energy returned than cost of growing. Corn gives 25%!! (Forgive me if this is not the best place to post this; feel free to tell me where to go...)

A US crash test of mid-sized auto vans gave high marks to some Japaneses product. Dismayingly, very low marks went to the Hummer!

We measure time by oscillation in energetic systems.

YESSSSS! THIS WORKS! Very cool, folks. I have an auto (12V) cigarette lighter charger rig I once made with a ballast of 100 ohms, charging two AA cells. This feeds 50 ma. On 15 hours, maybe a half-charge. On 23 hours, notably more. I just took a dozen pictures and the indicator meter still reads 'full voltage'. Is the capacity of the cell more than 1 amp-hour (1,000mah)? SCOTTY, RAISE THE CURRENT TO 65 MILLLIAMPS! 'Sounds good, captain.' I soldered in a 330-ohm resistor in parallel with the 100-ohm, so this is what I have now, a net resistance of about 75 ohms. The voltage I read across this resistance is 5+ V.

There's only one path, or locus where the moon is right in the center of the umbra. I've never seen such a diamond ring as I saw coming out of this! Usually those are notable on solar eclipses. Am I near the edge in southern Oregon, I mean, of the shadow?

If you are expressing an electromagnetic field, even an inhomogeneous one, then the Laue scalar is zero. This is the basic difference in accounting rules, either as identifiable mass, or as energy densities. Relativity allows for our confusion, if we keep to the rules: [math] R_{ab}=C(T_{ab}-\tfrac1 2 g_{ab}T)[/math]

Thanks, Jacques, that's a stunning, high-drama pic.

Depending upon just how cold things are in your locale, yes!

Aha, brighter now, still on the lower right. It's a bright SMILIE grin. . . . . . now a half-moon grin but with a strong curve, not a straight midline.

It is bloody red and gorgeous. There's a diamond ring descending the right side.

I am playing with interpretation of Schwarzschild metric space inside an event horizon. One can see that asymptotic to the horizon, the speed-of-light for transverse propagation becomes imaginary, and this speaks of attenuation in the two angular dimensions. If this is so, there are only radial oscillations! Voila'.

Whoa Betty, thanks iNow. You are offering a very different perspective! If I make a bunch of slaw into the large stainless mixing bowl, it is OK to keep it for 5-6 days? There was an instruction sheet with the full-sized knife-fork-and-spoon that said to not leave it in acid foods!<<Yes I cook eggs and do saute in a favorite enamel cast iron, most excellent and beloved 9" pan. Looking at the bottom, it says Descoware SPECIAL made in Belgium. One of my best flea market purchases.>> Then again I put im a stainless steel air inlet pipe with predrilled holes into my woodstove, and this lasts in an acid environment.....you may call me the "MAN OF STAINLESS'.

I will try to add a few coherent thoughts on the zero-point vacuum fields. I do not know well the matter field constructions, though I am reading on the Dirac field for electrons/positrons. Frustratingly little is said on p.416 of Cohen-Tannoudji's Photons and Atoms, Intro. to QED: electrons and positrons have possible states of |0>, |+/-q>, |+/-2q>, etc. "The lowest energy levels of the field are illustrated in Fig.1. The vacuum has energy Eo, which we take as the origin, and the corresponding value of Q is zero. It is the ground state of the field. The lowest excited states, characterized by Q=+q and Q=-q, form two continua beginning at E=mc^2 and stretching to infinity...". I can relate more about the electromagnetic fluctuation field. On p.189, "The fundamental commutation relations between (photon annihilation and creation operators) prevent simultaneous vanishing of the electric and magnetic energies. It follows that the ground state of the quantum field, that is, tha vacuum |0>, has a non-zero absolute energy, and that the variances of E and B in this state are nonzero. This is a purely quantum effect." In other words, space even devoid of significant local particle or photon content, percolates. Think of your television screen with no picture signal.

QM gives us zero-point fluctuation fields.

One might well ask, why be concerned about gravitational effects which are very small compared to electromagnetic energies in these small-scale considerations. I seek to find the common expressions of gravitation and E&M. In large ensembles of matter net charge is often neutral, and is usually considered so in discussions of rotating mass fields. In the small, polar energy can circulate and source the polar response of the vacuum, exquisitely expressed in the Ahoronov-Bohm electron phase-shift. The assumptions made by the Lense-Thirring analysis are of a non-relativistic rotating mass, but importantly this problem introduces a corner diagonal term [math]g_{03}[/math] in the metric. This is the first step in representing angular momentum. As I hope to complete, the electron nearfield will have that term and also a [math]g_{12}[/math] term from a magnetic field cross-term developed when you figure the RHS stress-energy tensor from my assumed circular current field. One has to decide what level of complexity in the metric tensor to solve for. The Lense-Thirring is a first step of learning. The form of [math]g_{ab}[/math] and its derivatives is what builds up the LHS of the Einstein field equations, and to attempt an interior solution the metric tensor is used to raise indices on the Minkowski tensor, and further in reducing the stress-energy tensor to the Laue scalar, [math] {T^a}_a[/math].

What is inconsistent is trying to do physics in different reference frames. General relativity starts with the statement that physics is the same everywhere locally experienced. We will see the clock near a great mass going slower by our clock; it "truly" is, as are all definable physical processes and oscillations. Gravitation is the stretching and compression of the vacuum fields. Elas, why do you say "partial vacuum"? These days I am seeing the vacuum field as the substrate which manifests radiation and massive "particles". Mass is local structure. As with Maxwell's equations, this is a circle so don't get caught in causality.

What is inconsistent is trying to do physics in different reference frames. General relativity starts with the statement that physics is the same everywhere locally experienced. We will see the clock near a great mass going slower by our clock; it "truly" is, as are all definable physical processes and oscillations. Gravitation is the stretching and compression of the vacuum fields. Elas, why do you say "partial vacuum"? These days I am seeing the vacuum field as the substrate which manifests radiation and massive "particles". Mass is local structure. As with Maxwell's equations, this is a circle so don't get caught in causality.

I just got my own SaladShooter for like $30 and I am baaaad. I've been without a food processor for a while, and I crave coleslaw. Fresh cabbage salad has to be extremely healthy to eat. In fact, a few years ago Science News described a study showing Russian women have not so much incidence of breast cancer and this was tied to eating cabbage. Anyway, my question: is it a mistake to make an acid vinegar salad in a stainless steel bowl? Once my mom sent a new set of stainless Farberware silverware, knife, fork, spoon. The instructions mentioned not leaving them in acid foods, implying leaching of some metal I do not need, like chromium or nickel. Is this indeed good kitchen practice, to keep such acid foods in glass bowls instead?

Frevin's sake, nothing is sillier than time. How can you define process???!?!!! Measures are completely relative, but this does not say they are undefinable! OK, specifics: there is a "spacetime fabric" whose charcteristics we are discussing. It is Lorentz-transformable, meaning that processes are the same in the frame of reference of different observers, but they will not be measured the same from one frame to another. Thus the twin traveler paradox from velocity reference frames; and more obviously, perhaps, the slowing of clocks closer to a great mass, like a star or collapsed body. I have complained and hereby do so about using discussions "in proper time", if this proper time does not manifest in our conceivable universe. This is problematic in extreme situations, which is why I referred in some other thread to "problems of embeddedness". We are talking about the nature of time and change in high energy/density states, and we'd all better be humble. The entire fabric of mass and radiation, though I do not know what to say about the DARK STUFF, behaves as per this fabric we are discussing.

Time is the procession of wave states which are locally experienced (in reasonbable locales) as radiation and matter. How do I define an atomic clock? By measuring any process against another "standard". This standard is found to be Lorentz invariant. Am I helping, well, I'm not sure. "Lorentz invariant" is just another way of saying "different reference frames". When you read General Relativity you get statements like "thus t is not a useful marker in the large".