lemur

I think this is a strawman of what 'God' is supposed to be according to Moses. A creator is not the same as a master/owner. Part of the mythologized acts of creation was to create beings "in the image" of the creator with free will and providence in the creation. In fact, the only part of the creation God seems to have taken into possession was the garden of Eden, in order to partition it away from humans. God is never described as some kind of puppeteer controlling "all that is." He interacts and causes certain natural events to occur, but he never limits anyone's freedom to choose or act as far as I know. Satan doesn't either, but he seems to be interested in tricking people into believe they are controlled or that they can control others - logically so considering that freedom of choice and action is God's will and the idea of control overriding or eliminating freedom is in opposition to that (Satan supposedly means "opposer"). Isn't it more like God teaches the road to salvation through repentance and redemption and people have the choice to use their free will to accept that path to salvation or reject it? Don't they have to do it themselves? When is God ever described as saving people without their initiative and effort? When Jesus talks about the only kingdom being the kingdom of heaven, I think what this means is that regardless of how much power, wealth, pleasure, etc. someone offers you, none of it would ever be worth giving up the rewards of heaven that would ultimately be lost by elevating some other authority higher than the will of God (however you interpret that). So people can choose to submit to Satan or any worldly authority generally, but if by doing so they renounce the ultimate authority of divine truth, you could say they are a subject of Satan's regime. What's more, I think that because all humans are sinners insofar as they are flesh and blood and therefore imperfect and subject to all the wordly attachments and seductions that come with that, they are all governed by the will to sin in various ways, so in this sense you could say that humans are all subjects in the kingdom of Satan and some/many are seeking salvation from being enslaved to their will to sin. That's why the Lord's prayer says "lead us not into temptation and deliver us from evil." because they're trying to redeem themselves and no longer be subjects of Satan - although many people would freak out if they heard it described like that.

That was a great read. Materials are transparent to photons where the connective lattice of their atoms are not capable of absorbing the frequency of the light. Then it says, however, that the lattice still has the effect of slowing down the photons a bit without explaining how that would be caused. My guess would be that because electron lattices vary between black-bodies capable of emitting and absorbing all frequencies to "clear-bodies" emitting and absorbing none, that there is some degree of electrostatic force that the photons encounter that fails to absorb them completely, yet still exerts some force on them as they pass. Sorry to speculate, and I hope someone corrects me with better information, but would that not be very similar to the effect of an electric field on free electrons? I suppose the odd thing about photons would be that they would immediately move at a higher C the moment they transcend one medium for another. Can electrons slow down in an electric field and maintain that speed after the electric field is no longer acting on them?

You make it sound like good and evil as forces that struggle against each other is not a cultural universal.

So when light goes through a clear medium like glass or water the photons are being absorbed and re-emitted by the electrons of the substance as they pass through it? I thought the particles just didn't absorb the light and thus it could pass through without interference. I guess that's impossible, though, since the light obviously bends but how can it get absorbed and re-emitted without any scattering? That's a divergent question, I know, but it seems like the photons slow down because they interact with the electrons without actually getting absorbed/re-emitted, in which case I don't see why photons affected by electrostatic charge would be so different from electrons affected by an electric field.

Why is C less in a medium then?

Here's what I don't get: why is an electron going through an electric field different than a photon going through a field of atoms? Doesn't the photon slow down due to the electrostatic force of the electrons/atoms as it passes through the glass, water, plastic, or whatever? Ok, as far as the electrons slowing due to momentum-transfers, here's the scenario I'm imagining: a cold liquid is charged with electrons until it begins to boil and expand. In that case, would the electrons decelerate as the gas is expanding because the average momentum of the atoms would be getting translated into expansion and thus the electrons would lose speed together with the atoms they were colliding with?

Imo, there are two types of information on oil availability/scarcity: 1) those that cause the price to go up 2) those that cause the price to go down. There are also two approaches to long-term consumption strategies: 1) those that result in an end of the non-renewable reserves 2)those that result in progressive reductions in demand that eventually decrease consumption to sustainable levels. When I drive a car, I look as far ahead in the road as I can see and if there is a cliff, I begin slowing down immediately so I won't risk having to slam on the brakes at the last moment. I do not accelerate. I don't tell myself that I'll have plenty of time (and ability) to brake when the time comes. I start slowing down immediately and making a plan for where to go elsewhere than off the cliff.

So electrons are observed to accelerate and decelerate? Still, how can they decelerate if they don't have anything smaller than themselves to transfer momentum to? Can a particle collide with something with the same or greater mass and still lose speed? What would you do if you wanted to slow down an electron? Pull the emergency brake?

But what's interesting with regards to metal expanding is that if there are no areas of special concentration between the atoms (i.e. bonds in the sense of plural distinct units), then the vibration among the atoms has to take place through the "collective bonding," which I assume is relatively homogenous throughout the material. I.e. it doesn't sound like there are concentrated bonds between the atoms specifically that vibrate causing the molecules to expand. It sounds more like the lattice bonds all the atoms in the substance together as if the substance were a single large molecule and the 'electron-bath' bonding them behaves like a liquid or gas diffusing energy and by doing so vibrating and expanding.

The purpose of humans is to maximize goodness and freedom for themselves and others. This means they will eventually have to start caring that maximum hunger-reduction takes place, although that is not the primary concern in the current global economy. It doesn't make sense to worry about cures for disease resulting in more hungry mouths because there's no reason death-by-disease should be a solution for global hunger.

You're giving too much credit to the mere fact that someone has been speaking a language since childhood. There are plenty of people who speak a language fluently since childhood but have poor literacy or critical/analytical/interpretive skills. Many people have strong intuitive meanings and assumptions they make when reading text or hearing rhetoric based on organic childhood learning which produce wrong interpretations. Don't believe me, just try teaching any academic/intellectual ideas to many non-intellectuals and see how they understand the things you say. They may be fluent in the language and feel it is their "native tongue" because they've used it since childhood and they speak no other language, but many aspects of it can remain "foreign" to them.

I'd settle for intelligent, humanoid humans - but they'll never have as good a warranty as robots will, probably.

By your logic, when would there ever be sufficient security to warrant having a child? You could argue that certain welfare-state governments provide enough social security to minimize risks but there are tremendous amounts of misery among the beneficiaries of the best levels of social security. So if there is never adequate risk-control to warrant having children, what basis would there be to ever do so? All a potential parent can do is maximize their ability to mitigate the risks and then choose whether they want to brave them or not. There is no authority that a parent has to answer to for the choice to have children. The matter can be discussed, but why would anyone besides a human individual be able to claim authority over an individual's choice to have children? Could you claim that forced abortions/sterilizations are more ethical than taking the risks of having children? In that case could you legitimately systematically sterilize all humans everywhere?

How is the issue of actual reserve availability related to the issue of macro-economic trends vs. short-term speculation? The point is that prices are always due to speculation and speculation may take into account any information in any way. Prices could just as easily plummet if investors speculated that widespread price-wars between oil suppliers would occur, regardless of how possible or likely that may be. The point is that investment is a response to information, regardless of whether that information may be valid or not. It is misleading to say that prices could be the direct result of lack of oil, because there's no way for lack of oil to directly influence prices except by suppliers (including investors) to speculate that buyers will be willing to pay more for a scarce commodity. What do you expect? That barrels will be auctioned off one by one to the highest bidder as they trickle out of the wells?

Does it ever occur to you how many robots are currently serving us without us thinking about them as robots? ATMs are automated bank tellers, for example, but they just don't have robotic arms and heads smiling and counting out bills with robotic fingers licked by a robotic tongue for traction. What about soda machines. Do you want a robot with a cooler using its arms to open the cooler and pull out a can of soda before taking your money? Traffic lights: do you want a robot holding one of those stop-signs used on construction sites? Photo-booths: do you want a robot telling you to "say cheese?" Washing machine: do you want a robot hand-washing your clothes? Machines are all just robots without identifiable human form. They still automate tasks and serve humans.

That's a misleading statement since "lack of oil" is not known except to the extent that various analysts form estimates and publish these for the benefit of investors. Speculation can just as easily create scarcity as respond to it by driving up prices on the belief that producers will avoid starting a price-war with each other. I find this a form of collusion (i.e. oligopolistic behavior) but since it doesn't require direct communication between suppliers to occur, and there's nothing preventing suppliers from competing, it isn't viewed as a failure of free-market competition (I think). I also don't believe this type of supply-side behavior is limited to oil markets. I think there is generally an economic culture of avoiding price-competition unless absolutely necessary. Sellers view price-competition as a mutually detrimental practice that should be avoided where possible by seeking less competitive 'niches.' The supply-side only likes the free market insofar as it allows them to escape regulation, just as demand-side only likes the free market when it benefits them. Everyone likes to have rights but most shirk the responsibilities that come with them whenever possible.

But why would you immediately assume differences in interpretation or analysis of meanings are the result of translations and language generally? People can use the same language in many different ways, creating different contexts of meaning and interpretation. Just because something is written in French doesn't mean any literary context of French-language literature will be sufficient for interpreting meanings of any other French-language text. It could be, for example, that someone who has read and studied Freudian psychoanalysis in English will interpret Gilles Deleuze more fruitfully than someone reading the original French text without any psychoanalytic experience. It could also be the case that someone with loads of knowledge of psychoanalysis could have a more difficult time reading and interpreting Deleuze because his language is so critical of psychoanalysis. What effect does the language of writing/translation have to do with any of that?

Someone else posted this (in another thread, I think) but I find it relevant in this thread if anyone is interested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallic_bond It supported the directions my thoughts were going in about electron-abundance and electrons behaving like a "sea" of de-localized bonding among the atoms, etc. but now I'm confused about the extent to which there are well-defined bonds between metal atoms and that to which they are "collectively bonded" by free de-localized bonding.

As I recall, during the deep water horizon disaster I heard that BP had to be imported even though it was pumped from the Gulf of Mexico. The point is that national oil-ownership has little to do with the political boundaries associated with nation-states. It has more to do with networking power, control, and economic position. My impression of what determines oil-prices comes down to speculation, the same as any other market. If lots of people are buying a commodity, the price goes up because people assume that the price will go up due to the scarcity caused by lots of people buying it. When lots of people sell a commodity, the price goes down because people assume no one wants to buy it and they want to pay less for something that they will have to compete to sell by lowering the price. But what causes the expectation that prices will rise or fall, thus stimulating people to buy or sell, respectively? Here I think there are numerous possibilities but part of it is simply the identification and recognition of cultural patterns. E.g. whenever political instability intensifies in the middle-east, oil prices seem to go up. So any hint of political instability emerging in that region will trigger speculators to buy oil in the hope of making money. This, in turn, will cause the price to go up. What would cause oil prices to drop significantly? Well, as long as demand is relatively inelastic, the price won't go down more than it has to, because investors know that they can make more money by keeping the price per gallon as high as possible. The only way, I think, that they might lower the price significantly is if they expected to sell a great deal more at a lower price, i.e. enough to make more profit at that price level than the higher one. But the problem with that is how much more can people do with gas than is already being done? The only other possibility, I think, is that people and businesses consume increasingly smaller amounts of gas to the point where there is supply-side competition where sellers are struggling just to get people to buy what little oil they can pump out of the ground. At that point, consumers would have a strong bargaining position to only agree to contract oil suppliers that promise the lowest possible price. This would create bidding wars between suppliers just to gain access to markets in the first place. But what cultural changes would be needed to put consumers in such an advantageous bargaining position aside from running their economies totally gas-free? As long as there is some level of high-inelasticity of demand for gas, I think gas prices will remain high to milk the most revenue possible out of consumption that cannot be avoided at any cost.

I don't think you should transcend the issue of conservation of energy so easily by asking where it came from in the first place. First, I think you should look at various situations in which it is conserved and how/why. What goes up must come down, for example, but this has to do with the concentration of matter forming gravity-wells where matter continually coalesces from positions of greater potential energy to positions of less potential energy. Thus, you could say that all the energy currently being released from various potential sources comes from the big bang, in that dispersion of matter creates gravitational potential (energy) and that energy gets translated into fusion reactions and other energy-releasing and energy-storing phenomena. But then what is the point of asking where the energy for the big bang in the first-place came from? Do you expect to recreate it and capture new energy from nothing? If so, you could just as easily seek out a nebula or other broad dispersion of matter and begin harnessing the energy of its coalescence. Or you could skip ahead a bit by finding a star that's already coalesced into a fusion reaction and harnessing that energy. In fact, you could just put up solar collectors on mercury and use the sun's energy, or just go sit in the sun and soak up the energy with your skin, maybe grow some vegetables or other plants. What's the point of creating new energy, even if it was possible?

I think technology evolves in the direction of increasing simplicity. Grids of wires are currently being out-moded by radio-transmission mobile phones and hopefully solar power. Local economics is rational because shipping things around unnecessarily is like having two economies (production AND distribution) to do the work of one. Since all the buzz about "the dawn of the information age" has faded along with dot-com stock booms and Y2K virus panics, it's easy to forget that digital communications still holds enormous potential for decentralization and empowerment of decentralized production centers. The problem, currently imo, is that "localism" and "green economics" has become thought of as a "change" from a previous economic system, which it's not. Whenever economies encounter new technologies, they evolve to incorporate the use of those technologies to maximum efficiency. It's hard to imagine that a few centuries ago, tailors burnt down the house of competitors who dared to employ sewing machines because they thought that this would make traditional hand-sewing obsolete and put them out of business. Existing business/industries may fight to maintain some level of market control and techno-cultural romanticism, but gradually I believe that MUCH more efficient and energy-conservative ways of living will evolve - along with growing cultural freedom and interconnection in "the global village(s)." The biggest social-cultural horizon I see coming that will also face the most resistance is the potential for individuals globally to diversify in terms of ethnicity, language, and culture. Because this has been associated with cultural leveling and homogenization, which is in turn associated with "Americanization" and "globalization," which are misconstrued as narrow and limiting of possibilities instead of multiplying them. Once popular discourse shifts focus from anglo-conformity to the cultural-diversification possible within multicultural republics, I think you will start seeing a lot more economically responsible/constructive migration and a renaissance of decentralized cultural dynamism. Maybe I'm just seeing hope because the face of anti-globalist terrorism is up for succession at this moment.

I'm aware of that reasoning, but I was wondering how they can be measured as changing speed since they supposedly don't move linearly but pop-around randomly within probability curves and things like that.

I don't think gambling is good, but you could maybe argue that when many people risk insubstantial amounts of money to fill a pot that makes one person very happy, there is benefit in that. However, imagine you had a very socially level economy, where everyone was mostly self-sufficient or everyone performed some specialized labor for the benefit of everyone else. Then, if you would start having lotteries to create leisure positions that allowed people to consume without working, it would create class-differences and cultures of privilege and entitlement where some people had to work to cater to the rich, i.e. social asymmetries etc. This can also happen without gambling, but generally I think gambling promotes a culture of getting something for nothing or maybe just more for less, which is the basic principle of exploitation, no?

"Watching" sounds like it takes too long. Seriously, though, my sense is that the discourse on torture is really oriented toward establishing definitional limits of torture that allow government to get away with non-official forms of torture since those are not specifically defined and codified AS torture. I think that governments might also use torture-discussions/policies as propaganda to send out an intimidating message about what could happen to people picked up as suspects. It might not deter people to think that they're going to be detained and kept awake for three days. On the other hand, it might be that releasing people after successfully interrogating them might actually put them in more danger of retaliation from people they ratted on. Also, once people are known as suspects, they could be shunned or even killed by people they knew because they could be seen as a means of tracing new leads for further arrests. Torture like water-boarding sounds horrible and I wouldn't wish it on anyone but it has the benefit of not causing bodily damage and I think it is easier to maintain your honor by saying that you divulged information after subsequent simulated drownings instead of saying that you did so because you were kept awake for 3 days. Either way, it is nasty power tactics to use or just intimidate others with generally. But then, why doesn't anyone complain about the threat of assassination, which is for the most part ever-present as a threat?

If electrons do not move in classical-mechanical lines of continuous gradations of velocity. I.e. if they don't accelerate and decelerate in a linear sense, how can they be said to have inertia? Does a free electron moving from A to B have the capacity to travel at different speeds according to the amount of force that pushed it? If not, what basis is there for regarding electrons as having mass. I.e. why not just call them a massless particle similar to photons except with charge and unique forms of transit?