lemur

Would it be too hasty to generalize that equations like this one carry a bias against considering that the particle form or characteristics of the field, and therefore the equation itself, transform under certain conditions? If a field would collapse or transform under certain conditions, I would expect its force to be conserved albeit in different terms. A star, for example, could be viewed as converting gravitational force into radiating electromagnetic force, no? These fields create volume because they are in motion relative to other fields, no? If they no longer had the capacity to repel or move relative to each other, their repelling force might be transformed into something else, no? I just put it out there a possibility based on the empirical observation that repelling magnets can be pushed to the point of direct contact. Their fields do no increase to infinite intensity to prevent them from making contact at all. This makes sense in the same way it makes sense that light can't propagate at infinite speed. Thus, I wouldn't expect matter to have a minimum volume for the same reason. I don't know if the grapefruit comparison would refer to the actual volume of matter comprising the BH or just the size of the Schwarzschild radius (I can never spell this word). If it refers to the S. radius, then there is no knowing what the actual volume of matter within that radius would or could be. All you really know is that the radius itself increases as mass (and energy?) enters. Maybe the mass/energy is getting directly converted into pure gravitation; i.e. fueling the expansion of the attractive field itself. I have often heard ppl get corrected for thinking of TBB as an explosion instead of an expansion. Maybe part of the problem is that ppl tend to think of BHs from the outside. If TBB was an expansion of a black hole as it occurs from the inside, that would make more sense, imo. Would another way to express this be that size/volume can exist outside a black hole because gravity levels are low enough to permit linear motion? After all, photons are the fastest-possible agents of motion in that they have no mass and all their energy gets expressed as linear motion. So if even photons cease to radiate linearly, how could volume exist? I.e. for a point to generate dimensions, it has to move from A to B (to C to D, etc.).

As long as people use this kind of language, there's going to continue to be the liberal-bashing and other counter-attacks from the right that make politics an annoying battle of egos and social status instead of a reasonable discussion of potential policies.

Because an economy and a view of politics has evolved that everything from jobs to compensation is an issue of distribution. For many people, it's no longer about what they produce in their job but whether they deserve their position and salary, promotion, etc. Most things that people consume are produced elsewhere by other people. So people just focus on ways to get access to consumption. People are willing to work when they have the ethic, and the ethic is not about working blindly because it is the right thing to do. A true work ethic is about seeing what you produce in your work and believing in the value of it. Money and status has become its own object for too many people in too many jobs these days. All they do is generate sales or revenues and expect a cut of it. People don't produce actual products anymore, so they just do what they do to justify the money that is distributed to them. This is why people who steal don't see it as something wrong. They just want the piece of the pie they see themselves as deserving, because all anyone is getting is pay for jumping through hoops. When people see that someone worked hard to make something themselves, they are less likely to steal it, imo.

so would any regions on this planet exhibit seasons? If not, and there was no day/night cycle, it would be strangely static to be there, I think. I wonder if plants can even grow without night-time and seasons.

Not sure what you mean by "congruity." I do agree with you that people have to remember the purpose of American ideology. I read someone say that the democrats are the only party that still believe in the American dream that everyone can succeed financially. I don't think that is or ever was the American dream until materialism converted it into that. The American dream always had to do with freedom and independence from royal (or other authoritarian) decree. Somewhere along the line, it became more successful to use fear of poverty to drive people to support collective economic prosperity over the freedom to create your own independently. The pilgrims didn't come to the new world because they could get jobs and make more money than in Europe. They wanted relgious/cultural/economic freedom and independence. What happened to the that American dream?

The thing that is so funny about this thread is that it may be right and wrong at the same time. Randian selfish individualism and total drive to succeed in capitalism may have indeed been responsible for the widespread technological innovations and investments that drove abundance to the point of financial collapse. However, it would be wrong to claim that the actual suffering resulting from the recession is due to this same spirit of capitalism, because what has emerged as a result of crisis is a socialist ethic that Rand would not have supported. She would have simply urged people to go on producing and investing and expressing their individual drive to create to the fullest in whatever way they could, imo. She would have eschewed the idea of doing so in the interest of any kind of altruism or social good, but for the ambition of the individual she would have urged to keep moving forward. Capitalism is a self-annihilating system of economic regulation. It is designed to regulate scarcity by driving up prices when a commodity is scarce. This price appreciation, in turn, causes people to avoid wasting it and this creates a form of ad hoc rationing. At the same time, producers are stimulated to produce more to cash in on the high price, which brings suppliers into the market and ends the scarcity. So when a commodity like real estate becomes so abundant that the price crashes, this is actually a victory for capitalism. It's like when you are at the end of a level in a video game and you have to bombard the monster with so much firepower before it topples. Capitalism raises the price and everyone in the market bombards the market with inventory until the price topples and then it's on to the next level. So Randian ingenuity may have helped topple the real estate markets but its true failure is that it has yet to devise a new level for capitalism to move on to its next battle. What high prices are in need of toppling through a market flood and that is where capitalism must go next.

Could the tea party produce a third candidate divide the right the way Nader did to the left, supposedly, which some people blamed for keeping Bush in office?

why not 1G? Don't forget ice-cream. . . I mean if you're going to bring a freezer and frozen stuff anyway. Or just plans for building a foundry using animal and human labor to initially harvest wood or other organic fuel. Couldn't you just include enough fuel to turn around and go back if the planet turned out to be inhospitable? If the ship had a sustainable system for recycling water and nutrients, it could be a perpetual moving space-station provided you could tank up on hydrogen here and there. Of course, I don't know to what extent the ship itself could degrade through time.

Well, if particles of matter actually consist of force-fields, how do you delineate the volume of such a field? Does a magnetic field have a volume? Doesn't the volume of the ability of the field to repel a field of the same charge vary with the amount of force pushing the two magnets together? Likewise, what makes you think that the force-fields that make up basic matter don't simply collapse in a black hole? If you put enough pressure on two repelling magnets, you can overcome their fields and simply stack them against each other despite their repulsion, no? Now, if the matter of the magnets themselves gave way just like their fields did, what would be left in terms of volume? The force itself might remain, but not in the form of volume-generating mutual repulsion with other particles. That is interesting about the universe having to cool for a while before matter was able to form. That brings me back to my interest in how matter forms from energy, i.e. what that process would or could be. Still, I think you are making a mistake to assume that energy has a maximum density. Ultimately this is my opinion, but I can't think of any reason why their should be a physical law guaranteeing volume from force or energy. If matter consisted of some kind of fundamental particles with absolute volume, maximum density would be possible, what what evidence is there that matter is absolutely conserved at some level? At this point I was under the impression that most indications suggest that matter and energy are fully interchangeable. Is this not the case?

I don't think it's that people aren't concerned and don't care. Generally, I have the impression that many people just don't care about pursing global projects so they see military work beyond US borders as unnecessary and even creating problems. This is due, imo, to anti-imperialist ideology/propaganda designed to garner popular support for protecting national borders globally by motivating people to voluntarily restrict transnational flows except insofar as local authorities allow it. Personally, I find this ideology superficial and somewhat ignorant in that it ignores the abuses that can occur when local authorities are left unchecked by other authorities globally. However, when people buy into this idea that "the US is intruding outside of its own business," it makes people a bit schizoid with regard to the soldiers doing the work. On the one hand they don't want to take out their frustration on the soldiers, but on the other hand they don't want them to be there to start with, so you get the bumper stickers that read, "support the troops, bring them home." Let me be very clear, because I feel like I'm supporting this national isolationism/separatism by explaining it: I think personally that this is a global world and has been since long before the US had a constitution, so I don't think maximizing national autonomy and sovereignty is going to solve any problems except maybe insofar as it allows people to wash their hands of global problems that have evolved with colonialism and global trade. As far as people benefit and suffer due to global interactions, it makes more sense to address global issues actively instead of avoiding them. Still, I don't know what there is to be done about the strengthening of anti-imperialist pro-separatist ideology in democratic civil discourse. If people aren't willing to recognize their personal connection to global economic and political occurrences, how can you convince them to? They know they consume global oil. They know they consume products manufactured globally. They know they export medical and other services. They know there's a global market for drugs and other illicit commodities. They know there are global discourses on religion, politics, economy, etc. and that their beliefs and actions contribute and interact with others globally. So if their attitude then remains denial or avoidance and they want to try to separate the US from other nations and prevent soldiers from doing their jobs, why shouldn't you let them experience the consequences of their position for themselves? Sure the world might become a worse place because of it, but how long do you go on trying to convince people to do the right thing when all they do is fight and/or drag their heels?

If people, women and men, would become generally "easy," it would create social problems because some people would be getting a lot more sex because of attractive looks or personality traits and others would be getting systematically avoided because of off-putting ones. Thus the gap between sexually rich and poor would grow and people who weren't getting any (or as much) would feel that much poorer as a result, just as high levels of material consumption in an economy make people with little purchasing power feel relatively poorer.

Racial/ethnic classification is typically used to track people into certain kinds of less desirable jobs, such as agriculture, sanitation, housekeeping, food service, etc. If you wanted to create a homogenous "race," it would probably make sense to create a eugenics program that required lower/working class "race" workers to have children with middle/upper class workers. The children should then be required to perform both "classes" of work. This would create a homogenous race/class of worker-managers who would be generalists and perhaps be able to manage their own labor while performing it in a way that conserved scarce resources.

The article was in reference to humans.

Thoughts in what sense? Why are you posting this personal letter? Sounds like something you would expect to read in a letter from a soldier. It is a shame they have to deal with attacks and that his family isn't stationed with him. It's good he hasn't gotten sick from poor sanitation in food prep. What else would you like to hear people comment on?

It always seems like people are cautioning others against thinking of the big bang as an expansion INTO space and insisting that it is actually an expansion OF space. In that case, I don't see why it couldn't be said that the big bang is not the expansion of a Schwarzschild radius of a black hole, only it is a black hole that we occupy and observe from the inside. I don't know if this is possible or even answerable, but it seems plausible to me that every blackhole contains within it an expanding, evolving universe and that the matter-energy entering it is in fact feeding the expansion even though it takes place over an extended period of time in the source-universe. This seems plausible to me because the singularity of a black hole could logically exist as a point without space-time differentiation, meaning everything past the Schwarzschild radius could exist as a simultaneous moment despite the fact that everything that enters the radius from outside of it takes place at different moments. The spacetime that expands within the black hole, then, could do so within its own big-bang-begun time-line. This actually sounds like some kind of familiar notion about black holes, now that I've elaborated it.

There are different views on this. I read an article that claimed evolutionary selection is best served by a female being inseminated by as many males as possible during ovulation and experiencing orgasm only after a number of different semens are present to be thoroughly mixed by the muscle contractions. That way, the various spermatozoa have an equal chance of swimming to the egg first and getting through regardless of the order in which they were inseminated. Maybe multiple processes of mate selection occur, e.g. competition between males and illicit mating (as you mention) and maybe there are also situations in which males don't compete but just wait their turn to inseminate and leave the competition to their spermatozoa.

That's why I mentioned Jupiter instead of the moon as a possible example. More than anything I was interested in identifying Earth-commonalities in intermediary layers of the atmospheres of larger-atmosphered planets. The gas-ring around a star idea is also interesting. I was also curious about the buoyancy of particular elements/compounds within an atmosphere. I thought that maybe there could be some reason that nitrogen, oxygen, and CO2 co-mingle in Earth's atmosphere that could also occur in a particular layer of another atmosphere, sandwiched between other layers, perhaps.

This probably is going to sound like a crackpot question, but I'll go ahead and post it and see if someone says it is testable. Is there any way that radiation spontaneously converts into energy in certain situations? Specifically what I had it mind was the possibility that radiation contains its own attractive potential that would cause it to coagulate into discrete particles in extremely weak gravitation and maybe a great deal of redshifting (i.e. stretching of the waves). In that case, is it possible that small segments of radiation loop into themselves to form the most elementary of sub-atomic particles? During emission, it may be that EM radiation propagates in a manner that causes it to proceed linearly, but that this linearity can breakdown leaving the waves to propagate by oscillating back and forth in the same wave, which would result in a discrete oscillating field-wave. This almost sounds like the description of a vibrating string as well, but I don't know enough about string theory to know how those strings are theorized. Anyway, I just wondered if there would be any way to actually test this since if particles would actually form in this way, it would occur after a good deal of redshifting, I think, which would also mean that such particles might form very few and far between. It would be like a very large and thin soap bubble bursting and the skin contracting into a number of discreet droplets in random points on the previous surface of the bubble. Is this in any way possible to generate a testable hypothesis from?

So the pressure/gravity relationship is affected by the composition and mass of the atmosphere above you? So you could hypothetically find the 1G altitude area of Jupiter's atmosphere but then so much gas would still be above you that atmospheric pressure could be much higher than on Earth at sea-level? Then, if you went up to search for Earth sea-level atmosphere the gravity level might be 0.5G or something?

Freedom/democracy has nothing to do with assimilating to be "like the west" or anything else. It's about self-determination and balance between hegemonies/counter-hegemonies. Also, I think you're taking a very superficial view of terrorism when you say that "we don't have terrorists from China hitting us." Since terrorism is not a nation vs. nation thing, ultimately, you really have no idea which individuals support or reject terrorist activities generally. The whole point of taking a global approach instead of a nationalist one is seeing that the world is composed of conflicting interests that do not obey national unity. There are people in China and Cuba who feel enough security and freedom to engage in a certain degree of self-determination in at least some of their activities; while there are others who feel very repressed and threatened. Anti-terrorism is, imo, a prolonged project of liberating people from such repression and threat so that they can feel secure enough to express free-will and individual self-determination in their everyday activities. I think many people can't understand this kind of logic because they are mired in some form of authoritarian ideology that leads them the value other things more than freedom or self-determination. Such people are generally living in fear of freedom and democratic self-determination because it poses a threat to their position within some authoritarian structure. Dividing the globe in to national regions or other zones is a strategy for controlling people and restricting their freedom. People debate the necessity and desirability of national governance and even engage in violence to assert their position and achieve their goals. The twin tower attacks were a pro-nationalist (i.e. national separatist) response to the looming threat of globalization as it was perceived via the media of the late 90s. I think the strategists behind the attacks targeted the twin towers as a "world trade center" insofar as they wanted to suppress global trade and segregate the global economy into more relatively isolated national economies. This is, of course, my opinion and everyone has theirs. Kennedy signed this right away during the Cuban missile crisis in exchange for nuclear security. Imo, your way of regarding nations as units interacting with one another homogenously is an old fiction that tends to obscure the reality that national unification is just one hegemonic ideology among many used to organize social consciousness and behavior. The globe is a diverse collection of interests and shifting configurations of agents in pursuit of those interests. There is really never any purpose anymore for invasion or occupation of one region by soldiers perceived as foreign to that region except to overcome the local belief that globalism is less than a reality. The anti-globalization protests of the 1990s, imo, represented a shred of hope that global freedom, trade, and migration could be suppressed in favor of national ethnic/cultural homogeneity. I don't think that there is ever going to be global consensus in favor of such homogeneity, so "foreign occupation" is always going to be a terrorist threat, just as war and ethnic-cleansing are going to continue to pose a threat as the flip-side of that coin. Of course, there are also various forms of multi-ethnic peace where democracy and freedom trump dogged violence on the basis of ethnic differences, but the question is what it takes to get from violence to that. History may have recorded many wars as having victors, but look at what happened during WWII. National governments abdicated to occupation only to have underground resistances mobilize until liberation forces arrived to overthrow the occupations. This implies, imo, that wars were never won in the past as well. There was only ever violence, abdication by central authorities, popular resistance to "occupation" or ethnic mixing within the region, and ultimately either more war to try to establish new ethnic-territorial dominance or some form of multi-ethnic peace that didn't require further fighting. My impression is that people tend to declare victory when their ethnic identity is asserted as dominant in a region, but isn't this just self-congratulating on the basis of temporary subjugation of "the enemy other?"

Nice post. Thanks. This confuses me. What is compressing the atmosphere so dense if there is less gravity? How would you figure out what the altitude was exactly and how much gravitation there is at that level? Is that possible without taking a scale there to measure it on site?

My impression prior to and at the beginning of the war on terror was that it was supposed to be a new kind of warfare the changed the ideology of war altogether. It was not, for example, supposed to be a war between nations at all but rather a war between democracy/freedom and terror-driven repressive control. It was also supposed to achieve peace globally by providing for the expression of war-effort (can't remember which Bush speech this was but I recall him saying it). Still, many people didn't and still don't get it, and so they keep re-framing it within their own traditionalist frameworks of war, which assume a national rather than global world where one side wins a war by dominating the other side. Part of this war was to challenge that way of thinking, but stubborn minds stay closed.

You're confounding concepts instead of clarifying them, and I would like to know why. When you say "some people claim that facts don't exist," are you aware how vague a statement this is? How can anyone claim that facts don't exist? Yes, people can debate what constitutes or "counts as" as a fact, but to say that they don't exists implies that they do in some context other than the one where they are claimed not to. That's confounding. Whether or not people "dare to transgress" assumptions has little to do with whether the laws they are obeying are valid. Someone who rigorously avoids stepping on cracks in the sidewalk out of superstition is also not daring to transgress, but in that case the obedience is not to a valid authority. Still, I think you are assuming that validity, truth, and factuality are interchangeable terms/concepts. I maintain that gravity is not factual, although it is a valid generalization of factual observations. Validity is not less "true" than factuality. They are not terms that differ in degree but in scope. Factuality just doesn't apply to abstractions, generalizations, or indirect observations, imo. Something falling to the ground or the feeling of an electric shock are facts. Gravity and electricity are generalized observed patterns that provide valid predictions about future events, but that is different from being facts.

Good answer. So a more gradual gradient of gravitation (talk about alliteration) is better for hold atmosphere and less dense planets have a more gradual gradient? What if you think about it purely in terms of gravitational level as a sub-section of any gravity-well, regardless of depth. In other words, instead of looking at the planet as a whole in terms of mass and size, I'm wondering if you could just look at any region of the universe with gravitation of @1G and have comparable atmospheric pressure. So, for example, a certain region of Jupiter's atmosphere at a certain altitude might correspond with another altitude in Neptune's atmosphere, etc. I was also thinking about this for stars, themselves. Obviously there must be some distance from the sun (solar altitude) that has 1G gravitation, but of course planetary gravitation dominates gas-distribution around the sun. However, there may be some other star somewhere that is surrounded by a gaseous atmosphere that does not coagulate into orbiting planets. In that case, could such a star's atmosphere exhibit similar pressure and even composition as Earth's atmosphere? The last issue related to this that I find interesting is how gravity and atmospheric composition could interact to form stratified layers of atmosphere with differing composition. For example, we think of Jupiter as consisting almost exclusively of hydrogen, but wouldn't the hydrogen all float to the top of Jupiter's atmosphere. In that case, if there was nitrogen, oxygen, etc. wouldn't those gasses sink below the hydrogen? I find it interesting that there could be a layer of Earth-like atmosphere somewhere deep within Jupiter or Saturn and I wonder what the characteristics of that layer would be in terms of pressure, temperature, altitude above "sea level," etc.

What makes you think that any war is ever winnable or that any war is not driven by conflict between idealists? You talk as if it's possible not to be an idealist or to accept loss as an option? These positions seem self-deluding to me. Everyone ultimately has ideals and/or a worldview that they assert over others. Everyone expects to win and dominate, even if it's only by delineating an autonomous territory for themselves as an individual and being sovereign within that territory. Those who claim not to seek autonomy, sovereignty, or dominance are usually doing so because they have found peace in subjugating themselves to some external authority. But the question is whether they are willing to stand by while that authority is dominated by a conflicting authority and simply re-subjugate themselves to the new authority, and so forth when it happens again, always accepting the consequences and never resisting power with their own independent authority. Mostly, people tend to self-delude by criticizing the other and differentiating themselves from that. By doing this, they are always one step ahead of having to come to terms with and take responsibility for their own positions and actions. They seek to focus on and control others instead. You say, "whether or not terrorism is a destructive force is a matter of perspective," but I wonder if you would say that if you were trying to democratically pursue your own ideals and the response you got was repression-by-intimidation and other fear-inducing violence. Would you still say that the destructiveness of your persecution was "a matter of perspective?" Yours sounds like the position of someone who has always been on the winning side of domination. I think there are many people for whom democracy is just a lot more trouble than they're used to so they favor logics of separation of differences and non-engagement of conflict. They assume that by doing so, they will never have to be confronted with anything that makes them uncomfortable - but to achieve that level of domination, you have to not only be able to win war but also to maintain a sustainable repressive regime thereafter. I don't advocate either, but rather democracy, but to achieve that you have to win against terror-driven repressive control, so one way or the other someone has to win and achieve peace and freedom by doing so, and ideally it would be everyone involved that does.