lemur

I looked at the chart, which is where I got the question. So that makes sense about the size and charge of the nucleus growing, but why does the radius suddenly become larger when the shell is full in the noble gas column? Does a full shell somehow have greater resistance to the attraction of the protons? Also, I don't recall the radii increasing significantly from a noble element to the next element with one more proton. Maybe I should go study it again closer, though, because I just recall the general pattern of larger radii as you go down except for the halogens staying small.

I assume that metal molecules vibrate more as they get hotter; but their electrons also must also expand and contract more as they absorb and release more photons. My question is whether both or only one (or neither) of these processes (particle vibration and/or electron level increase) is responsible for the volumetric expansion of metal as it heats up?

Don't forget that the reason why there's so much money to bargain away from the person who is paying for their daughter's treatment is due to an economy that privileges certain business people because they have access to cash flows generated by things like Bermuda golf vacations and yacht sales, etc. I.e. the doctors are only cashing in on revenues that they themselves produce by spending their big incomes. In other words, it's just classism the same as in any other economy. The only difference in economies with social-governance is that income gaps are lessened while class-stratification is maintain by cultural norms to which people conform. So doctors in socialized medical systems still enjoy special privileges compared to 'lower classes,' but they're just not as measurable as those in a less regulated economy where privilege has a blatant price-tag on it. Please don't tell me that you believe class distinctions and discrimination are a thing of the past in the social-economies of this world.

I agree that economic analysis of prostitution too often fails to recognize that sex is a drug that is being dealt by women to men (in most cases). The fact that men can mediate the exchange as pimps and thereby exploit BOTH the client and the prostitute shifts the focus of exploiter to the pimp, but why couldn't you view the pimp as a mere security guard and manager used by the prostitute, who is the "star" of the operation? On the other hand, when men are making ridiculous amounts of income and prostitutes are making relatively little in comparison and enduring a great deal more stress and danger, then there is reason to say it is the client who is exploiting the prostitute and maybe even exploiting the pimp as well to the extent that he too is placed in danger. Since you weren't focussing on formal prostitution but just the informal culture of women withholding sexual favors and policing each other not to be "slutty," it should be acknowledged that there are more reasons for this than exercising power over men. There is, for example, the idea that sex addiction makes people bad, which has to be true since every form of addiction makes people bad. So maybe the slut-taboo has more to do with keeping men from running themselves into the ground with sex addiction than it does with subjugating men on the basis of stronger and more frequent sexual desire.

Marat, what data are you relying on for the details of what actually happened? You say the US military data is biased and therefore suspect, and that is undebatable, but why then would any other data be less biased? Supposedly there is video footage of the event. Presumably that will at least be presented to some relatively neutral third parties for review. What if it is invented footage, though? What basis is there for establishing facts one way or the other? The thing I worry about from your post is that you (and maybe others) are reacting to the jingoism that is expressed in the story. If this is propaganda portraying bin Laden as using women as human shields to validate the 'heroism' of the soldiers, then it would be valid to point that out, but how can there be a basis for that suspicion except the assumption that it makes for hollywood-quality propaganda? Furthermore if propagandists were willing to go so far as to re-present an assassination as an armed skirmish with someone using human shields, then why would it be any less possible that the whole thing is a hoax? He could even have been held in custody secretly for some time until someone decided to use him for a political agenda. What constrains the possibilities of conspiracy theories?

Is there a reason that the atomic radii of the elements in the halogen column of the periodic table are smaller than most other elements?

That has not been my experience with academic work. My impression is that many many people get degrees and get told that a degree is no guarantee of getting a job and "get lost." It is logical that academia has to produce more graduates than hires, because that makes it possible for people to repay student loans using non-academic moneys. So if academic unions supported every graduate student's right to academic work and pay, all the money would have to come from taxes, grants, and tuition. Since we are constantly told how scarce all those funding sources are, and how competitive academic job markets are, people come to accept the idea that academia is a lottery where only an elite few will get jobs and even fewer will gain tenure. It is ironic to me that despite this, many academics still maintain avid union support; as if to say, "protect my right to fire practically everyone else climbing my corporate ladder." Hopefully they would just look for continually greater means of lowering costs and increasing efficiency. Ideally they would work voluntarily (they already shop voluntarily unless their family pays them a salary as homemaker). Then, by cutting out the buildings, management, personnel, etc. they could theoretically reduce their spending to a fraction of what it is buying retail. Of course, the problem is that many homemakers would rather have a nice store to shop in (preferably one that's prettier than Walmart) and they're willing to pay more because the budget they're working with is high due to union protection. Now ask the homemaker whose budget is low due to union exclusion whether s/he would rather cut out the middleman and buy more for less money and I think s/he would want to. Exactly, because you have the privilege of a union/government-protected wage. People without that are poor and would gladly organize a farmer's market if it would mean they could afford better clothes or make house repairs, etc. Because all the others merged into one and became a monopoly?

But social capitalism exploits these types of demand by using government to extract more money from people who have it and giving it to other people who get to spend it as compensation for performing all these forms of social-work. Without these mechanisms of redistributing money from profit to consumers, GDP would presumably drop as these social-workers would be unemployed and have less money to spend. If GDP decreased in this way, businesses would make less profit and thus have less means to exploit more workers. So social-spending is a means of strengthening profit-making/worker-exploitation. What forms of labor does this entail? Is it not something of value that is consumed by the people required to do it? Personally, I think unemployed people should receive opportunities to perform labor of fundamental necessity, so that there is more food, housing, etc. to go around. Too often it seems these same welfare state governments that offer such good protection against poverty are the same ones that fight the hardest to keep the global poor outside their borders to prevent having to provide expensive welfare services for them. How are people supposed to get money to redistribute and spend if capitalism isn't providing stuff to spend it on and collecting the money to redistribute? I agree there are natural utilitarian goals, but for the privileged global class of people whose means of consumption are provided for them so that their utilitarian goals need not involve more than showing up for work, caring for themselves, shopping, and socializing; I would say that their welfare is coming on the backs of everyone subjugated to provide the food, goods, and services they consume in their natural pursuit of social life. Imo, the goal of socialism should be to distribute all burdens of economic production as equally as possible so that no class or individuals should have to perform the most undesirable labor while other classes and individuals get to consume the fruits of the economy while engaging in more privileged jobs. Personally, I don't think any such army should be necessary, but that would require everyone being willing to contribute their labor in any way needed. If there was no shortage of enthusiastic workers ready to relieve others of their labor burdens, why would it be necessary to induce low-wage acceptance and fear of competition among workers? However, in the capitalist logic that workers have to be disciplined to accept lower wages and poor conditions, I would say the more unemployed the better because every sector needs a significant number of people standing in line for jobs, waiting to take lower pay and do whatever it takes to replace their predecessor. This also requires workers being trained in multiple areas so that more individuals can compete for each job than if everyone was only trained to do one thing. Would you also advocate training people only in a single specialty to prevent competition among workers and maximize their power to leverage the highest possible wage from their employer? If the worker was maintaining your house, would you want them to have the same leveraging power to demand half your income or go on strike and leave your plumbing backed up and your roof leaking? Would you want your food to cost half you income? How much would you be willing to support workers in taking from your budget in order to ensure they get fairly compensated for their labor instead of getting exploited?

If what you mean to say is that it is reasonable to submit to collective authority over your individual will, that effectively alienates you from your will to reason as an individual. I've literally seen unionism be used to "reason" to people that they are simply powerless and no one will listen to them if they don't join the union and allow someone else to fight for their interests. This is not to say that individuals don't reason with each other about unionism and about union policies and goals, etc. It's just that there is also this culture within unionism of claiming that individuals or workers as a class are relatively powerless or subjugated so they have to fight to get all they can by banding together and not allowing the opposition to reason with them because that is just a tactic to exploit them. When people start believing these kinds of logics, they trade in reasonable discourse for tactical activity designed to manipulate the other into giving you what you want. You see Walmart as a buyer's club? My view of Walmart is that it does indeed negotiate lower prices in the way you say, but it also prevents competition that could lower prices potentially further, thus setting a price-floor that other 'competitors' can use as a stable market-position indicator. Imagine if every few weeks a new business popped up and undercut your prices so significantly that you lost all your sales if you didn't immediately match prices. Walmart prevents this from happening by establishing itself as a low-price leader and other large stable companies make sure not to undercut Walmart's prices so as not to start a price war. Consumers could bond together to organize direct purchases that "cut out the middleman" of distributors/retailers altogether. They could also lobby government to break up large corporations like Walmart in a way that preserves economies of scale and makes them compete against each other to result in even lower prices. They could also maintain websites that tell which products were of inferior quality and why. The problem is that businesses would use such websites to deter potential customers away from their competition.

There's usually some reason people sin. Even when it's not fun or otherwise pleasurable, you could look at it in terms of Freud's death drive. Are you sure about that? Maybe you're just not aware of the damage you caused. Can you give an example of harmless sin? According to Christianity, everyone is a sinner and the issue is getting them to recognize it and confess their sins before God. Repentance isn't some arbitrary standard set by an arbitrary God. It just so happens that people can't find inner-peace without owning up to them and expressing regret. In Freudian terms, it's like a repressed anxiety that has to come out of repression to be dealt with.

The funny thing about slavery, imo, is that if you really reduce what you give the slaves to practically nothing (and yet they survive), they discover that they don't need you. This is different from wage laborers who are convinced that they absolutely cannot survive without their jobs and pay, so they actually desire subjugation to your authority in order to nurture their dependency on what you give them. Less than you think. Look at how many people grumble about inflation. Presumably most of those people have products they could cut out of their shopping cart, at least occasionally, and this would be quite similar to workers going on strike or investors selling stock in terms of affecting the production process. Yet how often do you hear of consumer boycotts as compared with how often you hear of striking workers or investor sell-offs? As I understand it, there are "right to work states" where it is illegal to require workers to join a union as a condition of their employment - and I assumed this meant that there are other states where such a requirement IS legal. I assume this means that you have to submit to union authority and rules regarding your labor participation or you won't be allowed to work. Technically, everyone has leverage as an individual until other individuals organize and find ways to shun or otherwise manipulate uncooperative individuals to meet their expectations/demands. So, yes collective techniques of leverage develop and evolve, but I think they also evolve increasing problems as they continually meet a more powerful match. It's like when you start picking fights around the school yard and at first you find that you get to dominate the jungle gym, but then a gang of bullies comes and wrests it from you, so you go and find a bigger gang of tougher bullies and retake it, sending those guys off to fortify their ranks and show YOU who's boss, etc. etc. You're juxtaposing communism/altruism with collectivism, but that is a misleading dichotomy since what I'm talking about is individualism vs. collectivism, where individuals negotiate and engage each other's power without bonding together in collectives, which requires their suppressing their individual will in order to support group-authority, right? When is power more or less "pure?" Anyway, it sounds like Habermas' idea is about discourse devoid of power. I like Foucault's quote that democracy is war by other means. I also like the fact that Foucault viewed power in terms of "microphysics," which emphasizes the power-engagments that take place at the (inter)individual level, even within apparently solid organizations/collectives. People are always vying for individual power in various ways, including through forming bonds and preaching collective solidarity. I dislike unionism for this reason, although I have no problem discussing issues with unionists when they focus on actual topics instead of the importance of social solidarity, which is imo nothing more than telling me to stop thinking critically and go with the flow of the herd. Obviously people not only don't always listen - they actively block out listening and obfuscate discourse when they feel it is going in a direction not in their favor. Still, I think this ultimately ends up costing them their credibility and politics always moves in the direction of truth-seeking because there are always interests that want to cut through BS because they are pursuing an agenda that doesn't thrive amid BS and obfuscation. Maybe this is too optimistic, though.

The irritating thing about conspiracy theory is arguing over whether something is real/true or not without sufficient evidence. The interesting thing about them is thinking about how the interest of believing or disbelieving will play out in political discourse. I expect people who have been complaining about global military intervention since before the war on terror began will be using the death of bin Laden as reason to assert the war on terror is over and to "bring home the troops" and divert military spending to domestic recipients. Since there is no reason to equate bin Laden's death with an end to terrorism generally, I don't see what interest anyone would have in insisting that his death was faked in order to assert that he's still alive somewhere. The really interesting thing is what happens now to the discourse that bin Laden is purely a figure of propaganda used to give a face to terrorism? Does that conspiracy theory get laid to rest because it no longer makes sense to argue about the non-existence of an imaginary figure reported as being dead? Finally, whose face will replace bin Ladin's as the godfather of all terrorism? Will people start resisting terrorism without a scapegoat or is that too advanced for global civilization at this point in history still?

Is this the kind of immortality where our bodies never deteriorate no matter how we treat them. Or is it the kind where our bodies DO deteriorate based on how we treat them and other health events, but they never die completely so we're just stuck eternally aging and falling apart as slowly as we can allow it? If it was the latter, I would take very good care of my body with the knowledge that it could cause me a great deal of suffering when I had evolved into a Yoda-type being 800 years down the road. If it was the former, I would not worry about how I treated my body as much because I would think that it would just regenerate and heal itself for eternity and I could do whatever I wanted and never reap any dire consequences.

Back to the OP: I saw the thread title and it gave me an idea. What if God indeed gave humans to satan because he didn't know what to do after drowning them all in the flood and then feeling too bad about it to ever do so again? It's as if he realized that they are sinners and doesn't know what to do about it so he just gives them up, maybe like in the story of Job, to be tried by torture. Then, the for the ones who seek a way out of the eternal torture of sinning and being sinned against, he offers light and salvation. But maybe he just decided for those who desire sin and can take (and give) the pain, let them have satan as their master to guide them in their journey through (self)destruction.

Good post. Clear example. What you're saying about metals and their outer electrons having low ionization energy and that forming a conduction band is basically the reason I started thinking that metals have "electron abundance" in the first place. In my mind, it's like atoms are onions and metals are onions with a lot of loose peel on the outside that can easily vibrate and transmit energy (ok, loose onion peels probably wouldn't be a good means of conducting waves of energy but if they were, say, those balls covered with flexible fingers sticking off them, they would). Anyway, the fact that the metals also easily give away electrons makes me think that is related to their ductility/malleability because it's like any practically any amount of energy displaces some electrons resulting in a type of surface tension among the atoms. Another way of looking at it would be that the more flexible outer electrons behave like a fluid between the atoms, which gets squeezed out, leaving a relative electron vacuum behind that causes the atoms to "suck up" to each other, almost like magnetic shavings clinging together in a lump. Thanks for explaining that oxidation doesn't necessarily involve oxygen the element itself. I guess what it means is that however metals end up losing their "electron abundance" (sorry to keep using my pet term - I haven't yet figured out which of the other terms I should use instead) - that causes them to be more "electron dry," by which I mean that those flexible outer electrons that easily change levels and break away are no longer available for conduction, ionization, etc. Am I overgeneralizing - does oxidation not always have this effect? Now what I don't get is why the opposite of oxidation is called "reduction."

It's not that no one completely understands it or that some understand it better than others. It's that people have what can best be described in Marx's terms as "false consciousness." That could mean a lot of different things but I mean it to refer specifically to people not being aware of the direct material relations involved in producing and distributing goods and services. People are simply not aware of what resources they are consuming and what labor is being done in exchange for the money they spend or that is extracted from their bank accounts for various reasons. Part of this is willful ignorance because people simply don't want to face up to the fact that the actual labor they perform doesn't add up to a fraction of what they consume. This is frightening to realize because it makes you very vulnerable to losing your means of depending on economic systems far beyond your control. In reality, though, all economic activities are within the control of the people directly participating in them. It's just there are loads of other regulators, managers, administrators, etc. attempting to influence them with any number of rules and other constraints that facilitate spreading money around to everyone instead of just the people who directly produce needed goods and services. Ultimately there's really no "us" thought "getting somewhere" collectively. (Social)capitalism makes sure of that by limiting who gets access to money and how much. Yes, but you know that someone just like you contributed some labor to the process. You might not ever know exactly who or how it was done, but you can be aware that all those people are part of the same economy that is providing you and people you know with everything you have. You and other people who talk like this make it sound as if economics isn't failing. You act like it is some kind of penance to understand economics so that you will be worth your entitlements. The reality is that when people lose hours, pay, or lose jobs completely, they have to figure out a way to sustain their bodies and try to avoid homelessness if possible. If there was more than enough to go around, why would recession be never-ending, as it seems to be? Clearly people have to come up with new means of production/consumption because they are gradually getting cut off from the ones they've grown accustomed to.

I think it's going too far to assume that Marx is saying that everyone is "employable." I think the reserve-army concept is just an observation of an effect of the invisible-hand that also has a pedagogical effect on workers. Whereas in pre-capitalist self-sustainment economics, individuals would have had to just search around for food, try to cultivate it, and make their own houses, etc.; in capitalism, they become increasingly able to sell their labor and this transforms them into competitors in a working-class. Then, the more efficient production processes become, the less labor is needed to accomplish them, which allows greater numbers of people to be left unemployed, which stimulates more competition to accept lower wages and accept whatever terms are offered by employers. In other words, it is just intensification of economic authoritarianism as a result of economic organization increasing. I have noticed this about everyday economic consciousness and it makes me want to tear my hair out. All you hear is people complaining about cuts in wages/hours and wanting more money. There is rarely any oversight expressed regarding economic resources and what people think is achievable in terms of fulfilling material and social needs and how. People literally tell me that if the government just secretly printed out more money and distributed it, people could just spend it on whatever they want and life would be bountiful. It's like people live in a garden of Eden where there's an endless fountain of everything to be had as long as you have the money to pay for it. It's like there's no recognition that it is human beings like themselves doing everything to produce and distribute all that stuff and not some god(s). And, yes, they are just "going with the flow" and thinking that as long as they do, everything will just automatically work out in their favor.

Where did you get this strawman about what I said? But why is it fair for either the business OR the workers to drive up pricing and revenues so high as to exploit consumers and suppliers to elevate themselves over those "others?" If investors and managers bond together in corporations to get more out of the workers and consumers, and workers bond together in unions to get more out of the corporations, should consumers also bond together to get lower prices out of the corporations? And what about suppliers that aren't incorporated into either the business or the unions? It seems to me that the practice of bonding together, either by the business-corporation or the unions, is to form a block and gain more power in demanding more money - but by doing this the burden of providing that money gets shifted to the weakest link. So, for example, if the investors and managers take a certain cut and then the workers demand a certain cut, then the only means the consumers have to demand more is to boycott products until the price goes down. If they did this successfully, the burden would be shifted back to the production side, where corporations and unions would have to fight over whose income gets cut. Then my question becomes if everyone is incorporating to squeeze the most possible out of someone else, what happens to the power of individuals who don't want to defer to the authority of their ascribed interest-representative? I.e. what happens to managers/investors who don't want to work for corporations, workers who don't want to obey unions, and consumers who don't want to follow orders in collectivizing their consumption choices? Do they all get marginalized and sanctioned until they join a collective and self-censor their independent-thought and free-will in subordination to collective authority? edit: to put this another way - consider the difference between the status of the independent worker in democracy vs. in unionism. In unionism, individual workers must comply with union rules to gain union protection. If union-membership is required for participation in a certain profession, the union can actually exclude workers from work if they dissent from union-support. In democracy, independent-minded workers are free to dissent from union-supporters and their opinions may still be taken account in policy-making. Someone may not favor unionism generally but still favor wage-standardization so that they don't get paid a lower wage than those with collective-bargaining, for example. Or maybe a certain individual thinks people should be able to accept as low of wages as they want, but they support policies that limit opening times and work-scheduling. In policy, such individuals have more of a voice than with unions that view unincorporated workers as enemies of collective solidarity.

Thanks for your posts, MC & HZ. They give me new material to think about. What I'm trying to do is get to a more intuitive sense of how matter behaves in and as chemical compounds. MC, you say that grouping them into families doesn't make a difference but I'm not so much thinking of just classifying them but rather looking at molecules in terms of dominant features (and maybe supporting roles as well). So if water is just a stabilized version of oxygen, and the hydrogen bonds cause the molecules to behave in certain ways, then it seems almost as though I could understand water as oxygen with some extra hydrogen smeared around it. I am wondering in general about the role of hydrogen, since it seems like really just extra protons/electrons that pad molecules. Oxygen actually seems similar in its effects with oxidizing metals, although I don't really understand much about the chemical properties of oxidized things generally. Still, it seems like oxidation generally increases anti-conductivity and causes loss of ductility/malleability, which I have come to associate as the defining properties of metals due to their electron-abundance. So as I start to understand metal atoms as being little balls of electron-abundance, it makes me want to look at chemical reactivity as mitigation of that abundance and the various behaviors of the metals. Is this view too metal-centric and in reality matter is much more dynamic than variations of metallic (and non-metallic) behavior?

But that is in itself a repressive approach to violence. Democracy requires that violence is regarded in terms of power-balancing instead of domination. So we're not supposed to be killing to repress the will of terrorists but to return fire to show that violence isn't a one-way street. It's more of an ideological difference than a practical one, but I think it's important not to fall into ourselves pursuing a terrorist approach to authoritarian domination. Celebrating death is twisted. You're supposed to regret the loss of life in war, not celebrate it. People should be regretting that Osama bin Laden's clearly good-hearted intentions in his life politics led him down a road that degenerated into killing and being killed. Remember he was a champion of democracy and freedom against sovietism, right? There's nothing wrong with politically critiquing western culture. The problem comes with advocating death and destruction as a means of achieving reform. This ideology was held not only by anti-westerners before 9/11 attacks but many westerners as well. I can remember people used to say that WWII was good for the economy and that Europe became better after suffering destruction during that war. They thought that the US needed a "good war" to propel it into solidarity. Such an ideology is just as death-driven as one that regards killing as a means to destroy capitalism, democracy, globalism, etc. No, I would never say that anyone should choose to behave a certain way to avoid attacks. That would be like telling children to keep their mouths shut to avoid getting beaten up by bullies. What I am saying is that there is no difference between celebrating bin Laden's killing and anyone else in the world celebrating the killing of US soldiers or otherwise. It is an expression of hate and hate stokes hate. That's all. When you nurture hate, you can't be surprised when someone else's hate ends up ruining your day one day. What goes around comes around.

What does "sphere of energy" refer to exactly?

Karl Marx wrote that capitalism needed to maintain a "reserve army of unemployed workers" as part of the means of business to maintain a cheap supply of labor. Since labor-oriented political-theorists surely know of this logic, why do they always call for more jobs? Is it that they expect to dissuade capitalism from pursuing the interest of cheap labor or does it maybe have the function of increasing restlessness among workers, thus promoting even greater willingness to accept lower wages and given working conditions, etc.? If media sources suddenly started reporting job-surplusses instead of calling for job-creation, would that have the effect of promoting greater feelings of worker-empowerment and choice?

I don't know really anything about the concept of wormholes except from scifi but wouldn't a wormhole connecting distant places make those places literally close instead of far away? Spaghettification only happens due to black holes. Wormholes cause macaronification because macaroni looks like a worm with a hole in it Seriously, though, I have read Hawking use spaghetti to describe the effects of black hole gravity on objects entering them so that must be the correct term.

I don't know if you've noticed but there seems to be a lot of potential for military involvement brewing around the Mediterranean. Do you honestly think that transnational military presence will ever end? If nothing else, training exercises will probably always be conducted among allied regions.

If this was the case, it would undermine the legitimacy of having a war on terror to promote democracy as a better culture. Basically what you're saying would amount to politics of destruction and retaliation with no underlying ideological motivations or moral high ground. Whoever said that the media images of people celebrating his death resembles those of people celebrating the deaths of US soldiers makes a very good point. It is practically a guarantee that terrorism and war will continue as long as people keep allowing themselves to be provoked and provoke others into hatred and bitterness.