Norman Albers

Gerber's baby foods were selling poorly in some African region, until some bright person realized that their jar lables uaually show what is inside.Someone here used to say, "I like people, especially the little ones.".

Are ground currents always involved? What about vertical static electric fields?

One day, over beers, I'll tell you about the snake who kept me company, above in the pecky cedar wall, as I tuned the upright piano. No, you cannot make up stuff this good! OK, back to science, this snake episode was from a relatively high-current supply.

Thanks Bluenoise, I thought wrongly that the alcohol would not be part of the structure ever.

So it sounds like Bluenoise freeze-dries his compounds. I'm interested in malt liquor, and sherry!

Now I now what you are looking at from the first reference, quite exciting. They speak of the deep rock (maybe 30 km down) generating hole pairs and currents, large in the aggregate. Atmospheric changes (like over a Taiwan island) have been observed prior to quakes, and they mention a basically vertical field. I freely admit to an absence of biologic knowledge, just hoping to put in a possible connection. It's hard to think that a snake would not feel a "high field at the boundary", but I defer to your discussion. I will add, you should be careful talking of shocks and conduction. There is always a lot of electric field hereabouts, but it exists because it cannot easily bleed away. It is usually a high-impedance scenario, until, say, lightning plasma breadown. Maybe if we could suspend a giant metal screen in the ionosphere we could draw power from a grounded connection? Different discussion but part of the point here. THINK STATIC ELECTRICITY in the air.

Y'all seem hellbent on dichotomy. Electric fields from inside the earth will be accompanied by some piezoelectric, and thus, sonic, energy.

My well-funded high school in New York (1966) gave us pre-engineering with an altitude chamber. Great fun pumping down God knows what.

If we can pull it out of the hat to reconstitute as radial strings, I will not insist on a pencil-breaking ritual.

Very cool answers (yeah, yeah)! I guess they use vacuum pumping to lower boiling points and such.

I don't know exactly where your debate is, but I thought you were talking about changes preceeding measureable ones. Maybe there are some sort of slow creakings, but certainly even very long wave, frequencies of minutes or more, stretching of quake-zone rock would be somewhat transduced if it produced an electric signal (as rock does!). Electrics always have a sound component if there is peizo-response material between, and it can be DC, or arbitrarily slow. Just not for good loudspeaker design on a 15" woofer. On the other hand, consider a diaphragm 100 kilometers wide, consisting of a peizo material. Whoa.

Deformation = Sound . . . . . . . . . . . . .The woofer cones on my 200WATT 15" w/peizo horn speaker cabinets (for keyboard act) are blowed out, but you can stick your head into the horns, on low volume (a few volts). Granted, they are efficient for sound projection only in the treble, but we are speaking of a small crystal hooked to a metal diaphragm of 8-10 cm. On the other hand is Mother Earth with quite a large "crystal". Whatever electric fields have come through, have slightly distended rock of any piezo response.

The piezoelectric property of some earth components directly transduces electric stress to deformation.

Once I left a beer in the freezer more than an hour for the quick chill. What I saw in the bottle was a delicate ice matrix. I popped the cap, and seeing also some liquid in the bottom, did the appropriate inversion. I drank maybe an ounce of strong malt liquor, and in less than a minute, felt the punch of the entire 12-oz. beer. WHOA, BETTY! I lucked out at the perfect moment where almost all the water was caught in the ice matrix leaving solubles like malt sugar and the other stuff, with the alcohol. I guess none of these things is incorporated into the crystals, not surprising, but you have to have the right freeze rate and, whatever, you tell me: this was a hugely effective concentrating process. Is this used in industry?

There is a good writeup in the current Scientific American on dark energy. Simple models do have a flat line of energy density while matter density falls lower. How do we connect zero-point energy here? Quantum mechanics says the ground state energy remains intrinsically in all space, so why doesn't this fill the bill? I say this field is fractionally chaotic, and that disturbances would not be absorbed, only perhaps scattered. Thus a subtle positive pressure.

It is reasonable to say a material is dark WRT electromagnetic energy of such and such a frequency range. The dark energy needed for cosmic accounting has presumably no interactions of any E&M sort. Dark mass is defined by its lack of interactions of the usual massive sort: strong (also weak?) interactions, or E&M. Both are observed only by their gravitational effects in the large.

I am reading an interesting article in Sci.Am. Feb.'07, on "causal dynamical triangulation (CDT)" put forth by three Europeans, Loll, Ambjorn, and Jurkiewicz. They work with triangles forming 4-D tetrahedrons called "simplexes", mostly on computer simulations. . . . . SEEING MARTIN'S RESPONSE, thank you for the encouragement. It is a one-pager, with a nice diagram, and there's not too much more to say. That's sort of why I just blurbed it here. Anybody may feel free to pick up this baton.

I guess a 1-D collapse would require a different metric, or at least a minus sign on the g_11 term. I'll try to see if this makes any sense from this perspective.

I don't even have to take in outside air; I can run the AC on RECIRC at high temp., and it does a very short duty cycle on the AC compressor, but uses full heater core heat. So when it is freezing as it has been here for a month, the engine takes notably longer to reach temperature if I am sucking heat from the heater core. Some fraction of what would have been waste energy on a warmer day is now needed. On the other side of the discussion, hybrids must have some small radiator, no? Would an electric motor doing most or all the automotive work have waste heat that could be captured?

You speak of multilevel physical programming. One would be bladder stress, another blood dilution, and then possibly what you say.

I describe the Schwarzschild solution as implying absorption of light in the interior of a black hole (BH). This comes directly from looking at the metric terms distinctly in the radial and transverse cases. The square of c in the transverse sense is negative. This transverse propagation depends on the population of radial vacuum dipoles. Obversely, on the outside, to have a "one-dimensional collapse" we need to see change in the population which supports radial propagation. Thus we would seek physics of the transverse dipole populations in this case, as a possibility for quark stars. Can anyone help relate this to quark physics?

The tricky case to look at is that of a charge approaching a current (beam or wire). We know the wire has an encircling B-field. The approaching charge crosses this and we expect it to "cyclotron" sideways. How to get side force out of an apparently electrically symmetric situation? I laid awake one night over this, but I had drawn the right diagram. We may transform to the frame of the charge, and the current wire is approaching us. Look at differential current elements on the wire, and treat them like the individual electron field we know about. Charges with a velocity component approaching you have a reduced Lorentz-transformed E-field. On the other side of center, the inidividual velocity vectors are broadside to you, and that E-field is larger by gamma-squared. VOILA, "ELECTRIC SIDE FORCE". . . . . . . . Puthoff noticed that you cannot simply L-t away a loop current source. No, but locally you can, per differential element. Now he surprises me by agreeing that E-fields are dispositions of vacuum dipoles which to him are a manifestation of the omega-cubed vacuum fluctuation spectrum, which cleanly is Lorentz-transformable. I am reading his paper on the sourcing of the vacuum field and will have more to say shortly.

I experience the psychological reaction Carol speaks about. Just hearing the tinkling of water triggers something. There a several levels and impressive programming in our autonomic nerve system. {EDITORS, I don't see the cursor. I curse.}

Beautiful, helpful answers! I am linking event horizons to collapse of two spatial dimensions. Could the quark star be seen as being partway there, namely collapse of one dimension? Logically this could only be the radial one, since it's hard to see choosing a preferred direction, or polarization between the two available transverse dimensions.

Offer me a deal I can't refuse.